"And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries."
— Kurt Vonnegut (A Man Without a Country)

"America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between."
— Oscar Wilde

"(Media question to Beatles during first U.S. tour 1964)
'How do you find America?'
'Turn left at Greenland.'"
— Ringo Starr

"In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope."
— Barack Obama

"Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half."
— Gore Vidal

"Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists."
— Franklin D. Roosevelt

"America has never quite forgiven Europe for having been discovered somewhat earlier in history than itself."
— Oscar Wilde

"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."
— John F. Kennedy

"the greatest Americans
have not been born yet
they are waiting patiently
for the past to die"
— Saul Williams

"So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty."
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

"Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage, and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world. Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty."
— John F. Kennedy

"Why did the Articles [of Confederation] fail so completely? Most historians believe the founding fathers spent a great deal of their first constitutional convention drafting the delaration of independence and only realized on July 3rd the Articles were also due."
— Jon Stewart (The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents America)

"HASTA LA VICTORIA SIEMPRE"
— Che Guevara (Che Guevara Speaks: Selected Speeches and Writings)

"Anyone in any walk of life who is content with mediocrity is untrue to himself and to American tradition."
— George S. Patton Jr.

"America I've given you all and now I'm nothing."
— Allen Ginsberg

"There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America."
— Bill Clinton

"Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"Everybody has their own America, and then they have pieces of a fantasy America that they think is out there but they can’t see…So the fantasy corners of America…you’ve pieced them together from scenes in movies and music and lines from books. And you live in your dream America that you’ve custom-made from art and schmaltz and emotions just as much as you live in your real one."
— Andy Warhol

"America does not know the difference between money and sex. It treats sex like money because it treats sex as a medium of exchange, and it treats money like sex because it expects its money to get pregnant and reproduce."
— Peter Kreeft (How to Win the Culture War: A Christian Battle Plan for a Society in Crisis)

"Everybody's serious but me."
— Allen Ginsberg

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."
— United States Declaration of Independence

"The God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?"
— Thomas Jefferson

""...until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream."
Martin Luther King Jr. "
— Martin Luther King Jr.

"We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world - bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are whores for power and oil with hate and fear in our hearts"
— Hunter S. Thompson

"And if we think that laws designed to prevent crime can indeed make the world a safer place, we should ask ourselves this: How exactly, is the world made a safer place by making self-control and responsibility irrelevant?"
— Jeff Snyder (Nation of Cowards)

""America's health care system is neither
healthy, caring, nor a system.""
— Walter Cronkite

"Being an American is about having the right to be who you are. Sometimes that doesn't happen. "
— Herb Ritts

"I sometimes think that the saving grace of America lies in the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans are possessed of two great qualities- a sense of humor and a sense of proportion."
— Franklin D. Roosevelt

""And if we think that laws designed to prevent crime can indeed make the world a safer place, we should ask ourselves this: How exactly, is the world made a safer place by making self-control and responsibility irrelevant?""
— Jeff Snyder

"The old woman had an old dog, but he hardly counted any more. He was so old that he looked like a stuffed dog. Once I took him for a walk down to the store. It was just like taking a stuffed dog for a walk. I tied him up to a stuffed fire hydrant and he pissed on it, but it was only stuffed piss."
— Richard Brautigan

"I confidently trust that the American people will prove themselves … too wise not to detect the false pride or the dangerous ambitions or the selfish schemes which so often hide themselves under that deceptive cry of mock patriotism: ‘Our country, right or wrong!’ They will not fail to recognize that our dignity, our free institutions and the peace and welfare of this and coming generations of Americans will be secure only as we cling to the watchword of true patriotism: ‘Our country—when right to be kept right; when wrong to be put right."
— Carl Schurz (Speeches, Correspondence And Political Papers Of Carl Schurz V5: January 30, 1889-December 27, 1898)

"A nation which does not remember what it was yesterday, does not know what it is today, nor what it is trying to do. We are trying to do a futile thing if we do not know where we came from or what we have been about."
— -Woodrow Wilson

"My country owes me nothing. It gave me, as it gives every boy and girl, a chance. It gave me schooling, independence of action, opportunity for service and honor."
— Herbert Hoover

"Fascism is actually the work of the synergistic effort of big government and big corporations working together to stifle the people. And that's what we have in America today."
— Aaron Russo

"It is worthy to note, that the early popularity of Washington was not the result of brilliant achievement nor signal success; on the contrary, it rose among trials and reverses, and may almost be said to have been the fruit of defeat."
— Washington Irving (Life of George Washington, Vols 1-5)

"Our country is the best country in the world. We are swimming in prosperity and our President is the best president in the world. We have larger apples and better cotton and faster and more beautiful machines. This makes us the greatest country in the world. Unemployment is a myth. Dissatisfaction is a fable. In preparatory school America is beautiful. It is the gem of the ocean and it is too bad. It is bad because people believe it all. Because they become indifferent. Because they marry and reproduce and vote and they know nothing."
— John Cheever

"Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which the taints, the sickness and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions
"
— Franz Fanon

"Eduardo Galeano notes that America was conquered, but not discovered, that the men who arrived with a religion to impose and dreams of gold never really knew where they were, and that this discovery is still taking place in our time."
— Rebecca Solnit (A Field Guide to Getting Lost)

"Oh, he shouldn't be surprised, he's a Marxist and has nothing but contempt for the bourgeois capitalist press, yet paradoxically he is also somehow an Americanist and a believer in Science and Freedom and History and Reason, and it dismays him to see cruelty politely concealed in data, madness taken for granted and even honored, truth buried away and rotting in all that ex cathedra trivia--my God! something terrible is about to happen, and they have time to editorialize on mustaches, advertise pink cigarettes for weddings, and report on a lost parakeet! Ah, sometimes he just wants to ram the goddamn thing with his head in an all-out frontal attack, wants to destroy all this so-called history so that history can start again."
— Robert Coover (The Public Burning)

"The mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation."
— William McKinley

"Have you ever seen a man eat his own head? "
— Spotswood

"[Walmart]s largest innovation consists in getting rid of the central Fordist principle of paying the workers enough so that they can afford to buy what they manufacture. Instead, WalMart has pioneered the inverse principle: paying the workers so little that they cannot afford to shop anywhere other than at WalMart. It might even be said, not too hyperbolically, that WalMart has singlehandedly preserved the American economy from total collapse, in that their lowered prices are the only thing that has allowed millions of the “working poor” to retain the status of consumers at all, rather than falling into the “black hole” of total immiseration. WalMart is part and parcel of how the “new economy” has largely been founded upon transferring wealth from the less wealthy to the already-extremely-rich. "
— Steven Shaviro