American Patriotic Quotes

He is a poor patriot whose patriotism does not enable him to understand how all men everywhere feel about their altars and their hearthstones, their flag and their fatherland. ~ Harry Emerson Fosdick

Our country ... when right, to be kept right. When wrong, to be put right. ~ Carl Schurz

Sure I wave the American flag. Do you know a better flag to wave? Sure I love my country with all her faults. I'm not ashamed of that, never have been, never will be. ~ John Wayne

You can be a patriotic American and be a critic, but then you're not expressing that kind of love that we're used to from a president. ~ Rudy Giuliani

Americanism means the virtues of courage, honor, justice, truth, sincerity, and hardihood - the virtues that made America. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

Some Americans need hyphens in their names, because only part of them has come over; but when the whole man has come over, heart and thought and all, the hyphen drops of its own weight out of his name. ~ Woodrow Wilson

When I die, I desire no better winding sheet than the Stars and Stripes, and no softer pillow than the Constitution of my country. ~ Andrew Johnson

We identify the flag with almost everything we hold dear on earth, peace, security, liberty, our family, our friends, our home ... But when we look at our flag and behold it emblazoned with all our rights we must remember that it is equally a symbol of our duties. Every glory that we associate with it is the result of duty done. ~ Calvin Coolidge

We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain. ~ Abraham Lincoln

Off with your hat, as the flag goes by! And let the heart have its say; you're man enough for a tear in your eye that you will not wipe away. ~ Henry Cuyler Bunner

Our hearts where they rocked our cradle,
Our love where we spent our toil,
And our faith, and our hope, and our honor,
We pledge to our native soil.
God gave all men all earth to love,
But since our hearts are small,
Ordained for each one spot should prove
Beloved over all. ~ Rudyard Kipling

The cement of this union is the heart-blood of every American. ~ Thomas Jefferson

If you take advantage of everything that America has to offer, there's nothing you can't accomplish. ~ Geraldine Ferraro

I'm an American first, and I think that's how most people are. ~ Ed Gillespie

I'm convinced Mr. Reagan would never be elected- I don't think his views are held by a majority of the American people ... it's the Republican party that's going to be committing suicide by nominating candidates of that genre. ~ John Anderson

Never met Levinson. Ever. He directed those American Express spots for us for Seinfeld, and I was off on some guest spot that I didn't even want to do ... and I got talked into doing it. ~ Patrick Warburton

American English is essentially English after having been wiped off with a dirty sponge. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

I was very nervous about the accent. I was very nervous about being an American. ~ Janet McTeer

Unfortunately, the American justice system is just riddled with lies and inconsistencies. ~ Tommy Chong

We have lost the good old British spirit. Instead we have American journalism and black-shirted buffoons making a cheap imitation of ice-cream sellers. ~ Oswald Mosley

In the last few decades entire new categories of waste have come to plague and menace the American scene. Pollution is growing at a rapid rate. Pollution destroys beauty and menaces health. It cuts down on efficiency, reduces property values and raises taxes. Almost all these wastes and pollutions are the result of activities carried on for the benefit of man. A prime national goal must be an environment that is pleasing to the senses and healthy to live in. Our Government is already doing much in this field. We have made significant progress. But more must be done. ~ Lyndon B. Johnson

I think I'm the best candidate not just to beat President Obama, but to do what is necessary to get this country going, a conviction conservative who can rally the American public around a common set of values. ~ Rick Santorum

We have a lot of American TV in Australia. I grew up watching 'Seinfeld,' 'The Simpsons' and those prime time TV shows over the years that feature grown-ups and high school kids. We had a saturation of American voices. ~ Sarah Snook

The first concert that my parents took me to was in this canyon in Saudi Arabia called Buttermilk Canyon. You sleep under the stars in the desert, and ex-pats - German, Swiss, Canadian, American - would play classical music that filled the whole canyon. ~ Hannah Simone

When was the last time you heard news accounts of a boatload of American refugees arrive on the shores of another country? ~ Marco Rubio

The abiding American myth of the self-made man comes attached to another article of faith--an insistence, even--that every self-made man can sustain whatever self he has managed o make. A man divided--thwarting or interrupting his own mechanisms of survival--fails to sustain this myth, disrupts our belief in the absolute efficacy of willpower, and in these failures also forfeits his right to our sympathy. or so the logic goes. But I wonder why this fractures elf shouldn't warrant our compassion just as much as the self besieged? Or maybe even more? ~ Leslie Jamison

My great-grandfather fought with the Colonial Army in New England in the American Revolution. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

Think of Chicago as a piece of music, perhaps," he continued. "In it you can hear the thousands of years of people living here and fishing and hunting, and then bullets and axes, and the whine of machinery, and the bellowing of cattle, and the shriek of railroads, and the thud of fists and staves and crowbars, and a hundred languages, a thousand dialects. And the murmur of the lake like a basso undertone. Ships and storms, snow and fire. To the north the vast dark forests, and everywhere else around the city rolling fields of farms, and all roads leading to Chicago, which rises from the plains like Oz, glowing with light and fire at night, drawing people to it from around the world. A roaring city, gunfire and applause and thunder. Gleaming but made of bone and stone. Bitter cold and melting hot and clotheslines hung in the alleys and porches like the webbing of countless spiders. A city without illusions but with vaulting imaginations and expectations. A city of burning energies on the shore of a huge northern sea. An American city, with all the violence and humor and grace and greed of this particular powerful adolescent country. Perhaps the American city - no other city in the nation is as big and central and grown up from the very soil. Chicago was never ruled by Spain or England or France or Russia or Texas, it shares no ocean with other countries, it is no mere regional captain, like Cincinnati or Nashville; it is itself, all brawn and greed and song, brilliant and vena ~ Brian Doyle

The short memories of the American voters is what keeps our politicians in office. ~ Will Rogers

Not long ago Congress voted, with much patriotic rhetoric, for the imposition of severe penalties upon anyone presuming to burn the flag of the United States. Yet the very Congressmen who passed this law are responsible, by acts of commission or omission, for burning, polluting, and plundering the territory that the flag is supposed to represent. Therein, they exemplified the peculiar and
perhaps fatal fallacy of civilization: the confusion of symbol with reality. ~ Alan W. Watts

Before Sutter, native people had heeded the cycle of the seasons, time was infinite, and life's rhythms were unchanging. Now, for at least part of their lives, some Indians were wedded to a concept that proclaimed that time was limited and that it had economic value. The clang of Sutter's bell announced that time was money, that it marched onward, and that it waited for no man, including Indians in the 1840s. ~ Albert L. Hurtado

After I left the White House, I kept a foothold in the business of American politics; as a talk-show host, analyst, commentator, speechmaker, and occasional writer. I was no longer a practitioner, but I was still a partisan, a Democrat, a blue-stater through and through. ~ Dee Dee Myers

The Latin American photographer has the possibility, and the means, for naming the things of our world, for demonstrating that there is another kind of beauty, that the faces of the First World are not the only ones. These Indian, black, plundered white and mestizo faces are the first element defining the demographic content of our photography. ~ Edmundo Desnoes

I joined forces with the American Cancer Society in 2010 as a spokesperson for the N.F.L.'s 'A Crucial Catch' campaign, which benefits the American Cancer Society. This was important to me because I lost my mother to breast cancer, and I have always felt a strong commitment to doing all I can to fight this disease. ~ Larry Fitzgerald

Let us remember that the main purpose of American aid is not to help other nations, but to help ourselves. ~ Richard M. Nixon

Tell this to ladies: how a hero man
Assail a thick and scandalous giant
Who casts true shadow in the sun,
And die, but play no truant.

This is more horrible: that the darling egg
Of the chosen people hatch a creature
Of noblest mind and powerful leg
Who cannot fathom nor perform his nature. ~ John Crowe Ransom

Colombia has a huge variety of plant and animal species, and we have enormous potential. Small and mid-sized companies should come to Colombia. From here, they have access to the entire Latin American market. ~ Juan Manuel Santos

I haven't heard of any cases of anti-American blog posts being censored or bloggers encountering consequences for anti-American speech on the web in China. ~ Rebecca MacKinnon

Either we're removing a dictator who currently has plans to fund terrorism against American citizens or
if Bush is completely wrong and Eleanor Clift is completely right
we're just removing a dictator who plans to terrorize a lot of people in the region, but not Americans specifically. Even for someone like me, who doesn't want America to be the world's policeman, the risk of precipitous action against Saddam Hussein doesn't keep me up at night. ~ Ann Coulter

It is day after day in this institution, borrow money, run up the debt, run up the deficits and then with a straight face say, we are going to repeal a tax that affects 1 percent of the American people, just 1 percent of the American people. ~ Richard Neal

The American Club was for those who preferred to have dinner at six and brunch on a Sunday and avoid the stress of dealing with Greeks and their language. ~ John Mole

No one would stand for it [being the fool in the media] in a minute if you took any other group -Native Americans, African Americans, Hispanics, women - but somehow it's okay to do that with hillbillies. ~ John Shelton Reed

One reason the United States is one of three countries in the world that do not have any form of paid maternity leave is that many American business leaders, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, oppose any family-friendly policies. They scare people into thinking maternity leave will be a job killer. ~ Madeleine M. Kunin

Unfortunately, oppression does not automatically produce only meaningful struggle. It has the ability to call into being a wide range of responses between partial acceptance and violent rebellion. In between you can have, for instance, a vague, unfocused dissatisfaction; or, worst of all, savage infighting among the oppressed, a fierce love-hate entanglement with one another like crabs inside the fisherman's bucket, which ensures that no crab gets away. This is a serious issue for African-American deliberation.
To answer oppression with appropriate resistance requires knowledge of two kinds: in the first place, self-knowledge by the victim, which means awareness that oppression exists, an awareness that the victim has fallen from a great height of glory or promise into the present depths; secondly, the victim must know who the enemy is. He must know his oppressor's real name, not an alias, a pseudonym, or a nom de plume! ~ Chinua Achebe

We Americans often say that marriage is hard work. I'm not sure that the Hmong would understand this notion. Life is hard work, of course, and work is very hard work
I'm quite certain they would agree with those statements - but how does marriage become hard work? Marriage becomes hard work once you have poured the entirety of your life's expectations for happiness into the hands of one mere person. Keeping that going is hard work. A recent survey of young American women found that what women are seeking these days in a husband - more than anything else - is a man who will "inspire" them, which is, by any measure, a tall order. As a point of comparison, young women of the same age, surveyed back in the 1920s, were more likely to choose a partner based on qualities such as "decency" or "honesty," or his ability to provide for a family. But that's not enough anymore. Now we want to be INSPIRED by our spouses! Daily! Step to it, honey! ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Isn't it the case that Jehovah's Witness patients are regularly treated now by what's called bloodless surgery? No transfusions are necessary. Allow me to quote to you from the American Journal of Otolaryngology: 'Bloodless surgery has come to represent good practice, and in the future it may well be the accepted standard of care.' ~ Ian McEwan

Yet in his own estimate, one theme in particular dominated all others: the growing tyranny of the majority, the ever-increasing and most formidable barriers raised by the majority around the free expression of opinion, and, as a result, the frightening oneness of American thinking, the absence of eccentricity and divergence from the norm.

A perfect liberty of the Mind exists in America, said Tocqueville, just as long as the sovereign majority has yet to decide its course. But once the majority has made up its mind, then all contrary thought must cease, and all controversy must be abandoned, not at the risk of death or physical punishment, but rather at the more subtle and more intolerable pain of ostracism, of being shunned by one's fellows, of being rejected by society.

Throughout history kings and princely rulers had sought without success to control human thought, that most elusive and invisible power of all. Yet where absolute monarchs had failed, democracy succeeds, for the strength of the majority is unlimited and all pervasive, and the doctrines of equality and majority rule have substituted for the tyranny of the few over the many the more absolute, imperious and widely accepted tyranny of the many over the few. ~ Richard D. Heffner

My name," I tell Wilbur in the most dignified voice I can find, "Was inspired by Harriet Quimby, the first female American pilot and the first woman ever to cross the Channel in an aeroplane. My mother chose it to represent freedom and bravery and independence, and she gave it to me just before she died."
There's a short pause while Wilbur looks appropriately moved. Then Dad says, "Who told you that?"
"Annabel did."
"Well, it's not true at all. You were named after Harriet the tortoise, the second longest living tortoise in the world."
There's a silence while I stare at Dad and Annabel puts her head in her hands so abruptly that the pen starts to leak into her collar. "Richard," she moans quietly.
"A tortoise?" I repeat in dismay. "I'm named after a tortoise? What the hell is a tortoise supposed to represent?"
"Longevity? ~ Holly Smale

Never in the history of American warfare has this nation witnessed such an exhibition of cowardice, indecisiveness, incompetence, and laziness in the army's senior officer ranks. Battle after battle was lost, untrained troops were sacrificed in fights they could never win, territories won were quickly squandered, and the chain of command was ignored to near-treasonous levels. ~ Dennis Byrne

I'm married to an American. I work for a company that is, you know, its headquarters in the U.S. ~ Wael Ghonim

My next fight would not be measured in rounds, but throughout a lifetime. It would sustain and fulfill me longer than anything in the cage could. My opponent, my fight, would be against the slipping aspects of American society. ~ Cameron Conaway

The Romanovs are overtaken by the Indian Maharajahs as American heiresses pick over the carcasses of fallen Empire. ~ Suzy Menkes