An English audience leans back in its seat and says ‘we’ve paid for this, so you’d better entertain us and not just muck about’. An American audience leans forward in its seat and says ‘tell me’. “
America - Americans Quotes
Great importance attaches to the material comforts of life, and peace, freedom from care, security are all sacrificed to them. The American lives for ambition, the future, more than the European. Life for him is always becoming, never being.
It may be that without a vision men shall die. It is no less true that, without hard practical sense, they shall also die. Without Jefferson the new nation might have lost its soul. Without Hamilton it would assuredly have been killed in body.
America is a terrifying place and I daresay I’m no tougher than the rest, but to attempt the more difficult seems to me the only thing worth while. At least I know what I am trying to do, which most American writers don’t, which is to live deliberately without roots. I would put it like […]
Violence is as American as cherry pie.
The name America… must always exalt the just pride of the patriotism… The independence and liberty you possess are the work of joint council and joint efforts, of common dangers, sufferings and successes.
America, thou half-brother of the world; With something good and bad of every land.
The Americans are a good-natured people, kindly, helpful to one another, disposed to take a charitable view even of wrongdoers… Even a mob lynching a horse thief in the West has consideration for the criminal, and will give him a good drink of whiskey before he is strung up.
America is a great, unwieldy body. Its progress must be slow. It is like a large fleet, sailing under convoy. The fleetest sailers (sic) must wait for the dullest and slowest. Like a Coach in six – the swiftest Horses must be slackened and the slowest quickened, that all may keep an even Pace.
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 given for heroism on the battlefield.
