Quotes About Americans

“God created war so that Americans would learn geography.”
― Mark Twain

“Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.”
― Gore Vidal, Screening History

“Too bad Americans can’t export Awesome, because I have boxes and boxes of the stuff just lying around in my attic. 
”
― Jarod Kintz, At even one penny, this book would be overpriced. In fact, free is too expensive, because you'd still waste time by reading it.

“He showed the words “chocolate cake” to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. “Guilt” was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of French eaters to the same prompt: “celebration.”
― Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“Americans... are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

“the greatest Americans
have not been born yet
they are waiting patiently
for the past to die”
― Saul Williams

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

“It seems as if Americans like to be the center of attention even after they're dead.”
― Hidekaz Himaruya, Hetalia: Axis Powers, Vol. 2

“I'm a bit retarded, like most Americans.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“I don't believe there's any problem in this country, no matter how tough it is, that Americans, when they roll up their sleeves, can't completely ignore.”
― George Carlin, Brain Droppings

“Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.”
― Jean Baudrillard

“This is the material, by the way, that has kept me virtually anonymous in America for the past 15 years. Gee, I wonder why we're hated the world over? Look at these fat Americans in the front row - 'Why doesn't he just hit fruit with a hammer?' Folks, I could have done that, walked around being a millionaire and franchising myself but no, I had to have this weird thing about trying to illuminate the collective unconscious and help humanity. Fucking moron.”
― Bill Hicks

“Sprinkled across the black waters below were at least a hundred small boats set out to greet the Leviathan, their navigation lights like shifting stars. Among them loomed a glittering cruise liner, her fog horn bellowing in the night. The low groan grew into a chorus as the other great ships in the harbor joined in.

Perched on Volger's desk, Bovril attempted to imitate the horns, but wound up sounding like a badly blown tuba.

Alek smiled. "But they're already singing our praises!"

"They are Americans," Volger said. "They toot their horns for anything.”
― Scott Westerfeld, Goliath

“I don't see much future for the Americans ... it's a decayed country. And they have their racial problem, and the problem of social inequalities ... my feelings against Americanism are feelings of hatred and deep repugnance ... everything about the behaviour of American society reveals that it's half Judaised, and the other half negrified. How can one expect a State like that to hold together?”
― Adolf Hitler, Hitler's Secret Conversations, 1941-1944

“I have always regarded as a stroke of good fortune that I was not born or brought up in a small American town; they may be the backbone of the nation, but they are also the backbone of ignorance, bigotry, and boredom, all in vast quantities.”
― Gore Vidal, Death Before Bedtime

“Americans, who make more of marrying for love than any other people, also break up more of their marriages, but the figure reflects not so much the failure of love as the determination of people not to live without it.”
― Morton Hunt

“But they're already singing our praises!"
"They are Americans. They toot their horns for anything.”
― Scott Westerfeld, Goliath

“It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self- conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations are in a conspiracy to under-value them.”
― Henry James

“But she has gathered that Americans, in spite of their public declarations of affection, in spite of their miniskirts and bikinis, in spite of their hand-holding on the street and lying on top of each other on the Cambridge Common, prefer their privacy.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

“American long for a closed society in which everything can be bought, where laborers are either hidden away or dressed up as nonhumans, so as not to be disconcerting. This place is called Disney World”
― Adam Gopnik, Paris to the Moon

“When good Americans die, they go to Paris,' the ghost said, after taking a drag on a small cigarette.”
― Karen Chance, Embrace the Night

“Americans may say they love our accents (I have been accused of sounding 'like Princess Di') but the more thoughtful ones resent and rather dislike us as a nation and people, as friends of mine have found out by being on the edge of conversations where Americans assumed no Englishmen were listening.

And it is the English, specifically, who are the targets of this. Few Americans have heard of Wales. All of them have heard of Ireland and many of them think they are Irish. Scotland gets a sort of free pass, especially since Braveheart re-established the Scots' anti-English credentials among the ignorant millions who get their history off the TV.”
― Peter Hitchens

“All Americans have something lonely about them. I don't know what the reason might be, except maybe that they're all descended from immigrants.”
― Ryū Murakami, In the Miso Soup

“Americans used to be 'citizens.' Now we are 'consumers.”
― Vicki Robin, Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence

“Shoot, I must have lived such a doggoned sheltered life as a normal, independent American up there in the Last Frontier, schooled with only public education and a lowly state university degree, because obviously I haven't learned enough to dismiss common sense.”
― Sarah Palin

“The British are the only people in history crass enough to have made revolutionaries out of Americans.”
― Shashi Tharoor

“What constitutes an American? Not color nor race nor religion. Not the pedigree of his family nor the place of his birth. Not the coincidence of his citizenship. Not his social status nor his bank account. Not his trade nor his profession. An American is one who loves justice and believes in the dignity of man. An American is one who will fight for his freedom and that of his neighbor. An American is one who will sacrifice property, ease and security in order that he and his children may retain the rights of free men. An American is one in whose heart is engraved the immortal second sentence of the Declaration of Independence.”
― Harold Ickes

“The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried [phrase-making] to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment’s reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

“I had always been warned that American didn't always get sarcasm”
― Lindsey Kelk, I Heart New York

“Happy World Poetry Day: 'The American identity has never been a singular one and the voices of poets invariably sing, in addition to their own, the voices of those around them.”
― Aberjhani, The American Poet Who Went Home Again