Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed.
—Langston Hughes
You can find your way across this country using burger joints the way a navigator uses stars.
—Charles Kuralt
All people make mistakes. All of us are sinners. All of us are criminals. All of us violate the law at some point in our lives. In fact, if the worst thing you have ever done is speed ten miles over the speed limit on the freeway, you have put yourself and others at more risk of harm than someone smoking marijuana in the privacy of his or her living room. Yet there are people in the United States serving life sentences for first-time drug offenses, something virtually unheard of anywhere else in the world.
—Michelle Alexander
Imagine, a room, awash in gasoline. And there are two implacable enemies in that room. One of them has 9,000 matches. The other has 7,000 matches. Each of them is concerned about who’s ahead, who’s stronger. Well, that's the kind of situation we are actually in. The amount of weapons that are available to the United States and the Soviet Union are so bloated, so grossly in excess of what's needed to dissuade the other that if it weren't so tragic, it would be laughable.
—Carl Sagan
America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.
—Evan Esar
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.
—Frantz Fanon
America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence.
—G. K. Chesterton
Golf is played by twenty million mature American men whose wives think they are out having fun.
—Jim Bishop
There are three social classes in America: upper middle class, middle class, and lower middle class.
—Judith Martin
Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
—Lewis Mumford
I can think of nothing more boring for the American people than to have to sit in their living rooms for a whole half hour looking at my face on their television screens.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower
In America the word revolution is used to sell pantyhose.
—Rita Mae Brown
Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.
—Gore Vidal
Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second.
—Edward Abbey
Democracy means that anyone can grow up to be president, and anyone who doesn't grow up can be vice president.
—Johnny Carson