American Quotes
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For 'King Cole's American Salvage,' I rode around in the wrecker with a local driver and watched him deal with customers and hook up the cars. I watched the guy who tore apart the cars in the junkyard. I also wrote poems about those guys. I loved hanging around the yard.
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It is hard for us to admit we have a sin nature because we live in this system of checks and balances. If we get caught, we will be punished. But that doesn't make us good people; it only makes us subdued. Just think about the Congress and Senate and even the president. The genius of the American system is not freedom; the genius of the American system is checks and balances. Nobody gets all the power. Everybody is watching everybody else. It is as if the founding fathers knew, intrinsically, that the soul of man, unwatched, is perverse.
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I'm an ardent American Football fan.
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There is something kind of aggressively and inhumanly repetitive about this line that guns are essential to American liberties - hard one to stomach when so many thousands of people are dying every year for this so-called liberty.
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It is now an article of absolute faith among Republicans that 'the government' is an entity separate from 'the American people,' which they say the same way that the old Jesuits talked about 'the mystical Body of Christ.' It is now an ironclad commandment of conservative orthodoxy that 'the government' is something parasitic and alien.
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When the American people elected Barack Obama and large Democrat majorities, the die was cast. ObamaCare was coming. Popular or not, constitutional or not, affordable or not, it didn't matter.
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The only way to be true to our American tradition is to maintain absolute governmental neutrality regarding religious beliefs and practices.
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I would sit in my room and become hysterical about the wild incredible story I was writing. And I thought I was writing realism. It never occurred to me that I was writing absurdity. Realism and absurdity are so similar in the lives of American blacks one cannot tell the difference.
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Our military doesn't defend our American people. Our military is the strong-arm muscle of corporations.
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I'm a Red American; I believe in tax cuts. But I'm a Red American with a lot of Blue stripes.
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I feel like this whole idea of wanting something that you don't really have is also very American in a way.
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The defining moment in American economic history is when Bill Clinton lobbied to get China into the World Trade Organization. It was the worst political and economic mistake in American history in the last 100 years.
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I think Congress can pass a bill when the American people start regaining trust in the administration to actually do their job and enforce the laws that are already on the books.
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When I think about the most exotic, beautiful places, Porto is at the front of my mind. It's incredible, man. You have an idea of what Europe is like as an American, and people talk about Paris, Berlin and Stockholm, which are all great, but it wasn't until I went to Porto that I felt that idea of this exotic, beautiful, timeless place.
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In American military cemeteries all over the world, seemingly endless rows of whitened grave markers stand largely unvisited and in silence. The gardeners tend the lawns, one section at a time. Even at the famous sites, tourism is inconstant.
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Every American has a right to affordable, high-quality health care.
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It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives its most distinctive character.
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Look, if America - if being an American means anything, it means not having to lie under oath, not even for the president.
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To be blunt, we went down that road in Iraq. Thanks to the extraordinary sacrifices of our troops and the determination of our diplomats, we are hopeful about Iraq’s future. But regime change there took eight years, thousands of American and Iraqi lives, and nearly a trillion dollars. That is not something we can afford to repeat in Libya.
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Of course advertising creates wants. Of course it makes people discontented, dissatisfied. Satisfaction with things as they are would defeat the American Dream.
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Most people who call themselves conservatives can't explain the American value system.
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My childhood was epitomized by my parents who were uneducated but had a doctorate in love. My dad pressed coats and through my mom and dad I learned about love, family and respecting people. They never went to high school but they had within them every element that makes a great American. They had pride and a great work ethic and they knew how to do things the right way.
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Ever since 9/11, our intelligence agencies, as part of the 'war on terror,' have expanded their operations to include American citizens. I was 'terrorized' when I learned that the National Security Agency was intercepting information on Americans.
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Having been connected with industry during my entire life, it seems eminently proper that I should turn back, in part, the proceeds of that activity with the hope of promoting a broader as well as a better understanding of the economic principles and national policies which have characterized American enterprise down through the years.