America

(119 votes)   For this is what America is all about. It is the uncrossed desert and the unclimbed ridge. It is the star that is not reached and the harvest that is sleeping in the unplowed ground.

Lyndon B. Johnson
1908-1973, Thirty-sixth President of the USA

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(117 votes)   France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter -- it was the graves at Shiloh and the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, and the country boys dying in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart.

Source Unknown

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(115 votes)   Of all the nations in the world, the United States was built in nobody's image. It was the land of the unexpected, of unbounded hope, of ideals, of quest for an unknown perfection. It is all the more unfitting that we should offer ourselves in images. And all the more fitting that the images which we make wittingly or unwittingly to sell America to the world should come back to haunt and curse us.

Daniel J. Boorstin
1914-, American Historian

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(111 votes)   America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers.

William S. Burroughs
1914-1997, American Writer

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(109 votes)   America is rather like life. You can usually find in it what you look for. It will probably be interesting, and it is sure to be large.

Edward M. Forster
1879-1970, British Novelist, Essayist

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(100 votes)   The gap between ideals and actualities, between dreams and achievements, the gap that can spur strong men to increased exertions, but can break the spirit of others -- this gap is the most conspicuous, continuous land mark in American history. It is conspicuous and continuous not because Americans achieve little, but because they dream grandly. The gap is a standing reproach to Americans; but it marks them off as a special and singularly admirable community among the world's peoples.

George F. Will
1941-, American Political Columnist

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(100 votes)   The main thing that endears the United Nations to member governments, and so enables it to survive, is its proven capacity to fail. You can safely appeal to the United Nations in the comfortable certainty that it will let you down.

Conor Cruise O'Brien
1917-, Irish Historian, Critic, and Statesman

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(97 votes)   America is promises to take! America is promises to us to take them.

Archibald Macleish
1892-1982, American Poet

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(97 votes)   Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the battle field.

James Baldwin
1924-1987, American Author

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(94 votes)   To be an American (unlike being English or French or whatever) is precisely to imagine a destiny rather than to inherit one; since we have always been, insofar as we are Americans at all, inhabitants of myth rather than history.

Leslie Fiedler
1917-, American Literary Critic, educator

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(91 votes)   We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

Alexander Pope
1688-1744, British Poet, Critic, Translator

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(88 votes)   There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
1874-1936, British Author

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(87 votes)   The ideal American type is perfectly expressed by the Protestant, individualist, anti-conformist, and this is the type that is in the process of disappearing. In reality there are few left.

Orson Welles
1915-1985, American Film Maker

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(85 votes)   If its individual citizens, to a man, are to be believed, it always is depressed, and always is stagnated, and always is at an alarming crisis, and never was otherwise; though as a body, they are ready to make oath upon the Evangelists, at any hour of the day or night, that it is the most thriving and prosperous of all countries on the habitable globe.

Charles Dickens
1812-1870, British Novelist

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(85 votes)   The trouble with this country is that there are too many people going about saying, ''The trouble with this country is...''

Sinclair Lewis
1885-1951, First American Novelist to win the Nobel Prize for literature

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