"Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally"
— Abraham Lincoln

"An Englishman is a person who does things because they have been done before. An American is a person who does things because they haven't been done before."
— Mark Twain

"Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged. Missing me one place, search another. I stop somewhere waiting for you."
— Walt Whitman

"Never Let anyone tell you that you can't; show them that you can."
— Gloria Mallette

"If I had my way we'd sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes."
— William S. Burroughs

"I am proud to be an American. Because an American can eat anything on the face of this earth as long as he has two pieces of bread."
— Bill Cosby

"" You sounded like Dolly parton on helium."
(After kristy lee cook of season 7 on american idol,sang her country rendition of the Beatles'"Eight Days A Week.) "
— Simon Cowell

"I had all the characteristics of a human being—flesh, blood, skin, hair—but my depersonalization was so intense, had gone so deep, that my normal ability to feel compassion had been eradicated, the victim of a slow, purposeful erasure. I was simply imitating reality, a rough resemblance of a human being, with only a dim corner of my mind functioning"
— Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho)

"…there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there. It is hard for me to make sense on any given level. Myself is fabricated, an aberration. I am a noncontingent human being. My personality is sketchy and unformed, my heartlessness goes deep and is persistent. My conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago (probably at Harvard) if they ever did exist. There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it, I have now surpassed. I still, though, hold on to one single bleak truth: no one is safe, nothing is redeemed. Yet I am blameless. Each model of human behavior must be assumed to have some validity. Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do? My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this—and I have countless times, in just about every act I’ve committed—and coming face-to-face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling. There has been no reason for me to tell you any of this. This confession has meant nothing…."
— Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho)

""It was like orderin a hamburger and getting only the buns"
(After Brooke White of season 7 on american idol sang the song 'Hero'
by Mariah Carey""
— Simon Cowell

"Passion such as hers is all consent, asking little in return. I had merely to enter a room where she was to see her face take on that peaceful expression of one who is resting in bed. If I touched her, I had the impression that all the blood in her veins was turning to honey."
— Marguerite Yourcenar

""The Holy Land is everywhere""
— Black Elk

"I salute to you Commander
and I sneeze
'Cause I have Now
an Allergy
To your policies it seems

Where have we gone wrong America?
Mr. Lincoln we can't seem
to find you anywhere out of the millions
From the deserts
To the mountains
Over prairies
To the shores
Is this just the Madness of King George
Yo George
Is this just the Madness of King George
Yo George
Well you have the whole Nation
on all fours. "
— Tori Amos

"There is nothing political about American literature."
— Laura Bush

"Liars dont inherit God's kindgom"
— Danny Noriega

"...with the most infinite tenderness I have ever known in my life, he put his arms around me, gently, gently, and I embraced him around the neck, and we touched..."
— Katherine Anne Porter

"The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, -- this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost... He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American..."
— W.E.B. DuBois (Souls of Black Folk & Era of Franklin D. Roosevelt 1933-1945 & Movements of the New Left 1950-1975)

"Between two stools you fall to the floor."
— American proverb

""But wherever we are, we must all, in our daily lives, live up to the age-old faith that peace and freedom walk together. In too many of our cities today, the peace is not secure because freedom is incomplete." (John F. Kennedy, June 10, 1963, American University speech)"
— John F. Kennedy

""And is not peace, in the last analysis, basically a matter of human rights -- the right to live out our lives without fear of devastation – the right to breathe air as nature provided it -- the right of future generations to a healthy existence?" (John F. Kennedy, June 10, 1963, American University speech)"
— John F. Kennedy

"An American is insubmissive, lonely, self-educated, and polite."
— Thornton Wilder

"Most timidities have such secret compensations and Miss Bart was discerning enough to know that the inner vanity is generally in proportion to the outer self depreciation."
— Edith Wharton (The House of Mirth)

"Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by man and woman in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence than ours.

Grover Cleveland, 1905

The heroine in my next book begs to disagree and prove old Grover's wrong.

Sarah Richmond, 2008"
— Grover Cleveland and Sarah Richmond

"We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."
— Woodrow Wilson

"In the depths of him, he too didn't want to go. But he was a born American, and if anything was on show, he had to see it. That was Life."
— D.H. Lawrence (Plumed Serpent, The)

"We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police; but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder ‘censorship,’ we call it ‘concern for commercial viability."
— David Mamet

"Our fiction is not merely in flight from the physical data of the actual world…it is, bewilderingly and embarrassingly, a gothic fiction, nonrealistic and negative, sadist and melodramatic – a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation…our classic [American] literature is a literature of horror for boys"
— Leslie Fielder

"In its annual Best of Issue, readers voted me BEST AUTHOR of Pasadena in the annual Best of Issue in the Pasadena Weekly!!"
— Andre Coleman