Quotes Tagged "america-and-americans"

The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible, like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an atheist.

There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris.

The sorrows and disasters of Europe always brought fortune to America.

The American's conversation is much like his courtship ... He gives an inkling and watches for a reaction; if the weather looks fair, he inkles a little more. Wishing neither to intrude nor be intruded upon, he advances by stages of acceptance, by levels of agreement, by steps of concurrence.

The central fact of North American history is that there were fifteen British Colonies before 1776. Thirteen rebelled and two did not.

A natural New Yorker is a native of the present tense.

New York is notoriously inhospitable to the past, disowning it whenever it can.

Why, if you're not in New York you are camping out.

That enfabled rock, that ship of life, that swarming, million-footed, tower-masted, sky-soaring citadel that bears the magic name of the Island of Manhattan.

I don't like the life here in New York. There is no greenery. It would make a stone sick.

New York, the nation's thyroid gland.

You will find the Americans much as the Greeks found the Romans: great, big, vulgar, bustling people more vigorous than we are and also more idle, with more unspoiled virtues but also more corrupt.

As for what you're calling hard luck - well, we made New England out of it. That and codfish.

The lusts of the flesh can be gratified anywhere; it is not this sort of licence that distinguishes New York. It is, rather, a lust of the total ego for recognition, even for eminence. More than elsewhere, everybody here wants to be Somebody.

After twenty annual visits, I am still surprised each time I return to see this giant asparagus bed of alabaster and rose and green skyscrapers.

He speaks English with the flawless imperfection of a New Yorker.

A town that has no ceiling price, A town of double-talk; A town so big men name her twice, Like so: 'N'Yawk, N'Yawk.'

And this is good old Boston The home of the bean and the cod - Where the Lowells talk to the Cabots, And the Cabots talk only to God.