How hard it is for Americans, even Americans of goodwill, not to consider themselves the center of the universe.
—Simone de Beauvoir
Americans are very friendly and very suspicious, that is what Americans are and that is what always upsets the foreigner who deals with them, they are so friendly how can they be so suspicious they are so suspicious how can they be so friendly but they just are.
—Gertrude Stein
The Americans, who are the most efficient people on earth,… have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on a 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
Too many of us look upon Americans as dollar chasers. This is a cruel libel, even if it is reiterated thoughtlessly by the Americans themselves.
—Albert Einstein
The people reign over the American political world as God rules over the universe. It is the cause and the end of all things; everything rises out of it and is absorbed back into it.
—Alexis de Tocqueville
I was born an American; I will live an American; I shall die an American.
—Daniel Webster
How much longer are we going to think it necessary to be ''American'' before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, and having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries?
—Edith Wharton
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
Americans never quit.
—General Douglas Macarthur
Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them.
—George Bernard Shaw
Americans are overreachers; overreaching is the most admirable of the many American excesses.
—George Will
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
—H. L. Mencken
The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way.
—Henry David Thoreau
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
Americans are benevolently ignorant about Canada, while Canadians are malevolently well informed about the United States.
—J. Bartlett Brebner