American Soul Quotes

There's all sorts of soul. There's Irish soul and Native American soul. If it touches you and moves you, it's soul. ~ John Oates

The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. ~ D.H. Lawrence

[I]n the American soul there is a lonely individual standing in a vast landscape. 
He is either on a horse or driving a car, depending, and either way he's carrying a gun. 
This is one of the essential images in American mythology. ~ Don DeLillo

Ah! American cigarettes are like the American soul - sweet and light. ~ Hans Frank

Poverty is a relatively mild disease for even a very flimsy American soul, but uselessness will kill strong and weak souls alike, and kill every time. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

The title song of David Bowie's 'Young Americans' is one of his handful of classics, a bizarre mixture of social comment, run-on lyric style, English pop and American soul. ~ Jon Landau

Nothing is further from the truth than the claim that the American soul is 'open-minded' and unbiased; on the contrary, it is ridden with countless taboos of which people are sometimes not even aware. ~ Julius Evola

All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it's your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake. ~ June Jordan

There is a barbarism in the American soul, and we must protect some of it by law. To root it out is to endanger our lives on the one hand, and our liberty on the other. ~ Charlie Pierce

D. H. Lawrence used to observe on our national character: "The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted." Women ~ Piper Kerman

I'm even taller in person, because photographs shrink you down and steal your soul native american. ~ Thom Yorke

It's not surprising to me that in a country born of racial genocide, the issue of race is still an open wound on the American soul. We haven't dealt with it. ~ Michael Moore

We are creating a political demolition derby, not a presidential debate. Those strange impulses in the American soul that have produced mud wrestling and The Gong Show seem to have claimed the national campaign. ~ Hugh Sidey

Can it be that the ultimate chapter of this new era of democratic freedom is going to be deformed by this growing drift toward conformity encouraged by politics and sentimental education? If so then by what name shall our national American character be justly called? Doomed to beget only curiosities or monstrosities in art, architecture and religion by artists predominant chiefly by compliance with commercial expediency?
Machine standardization is apparently growing to mean little that is inspiring to the human spirit. We see the American workman himself becoming the prey of gangsterism made official. Everything as now professionalized, in time dies spiritually. Must the innate beauty of American life succumb or be destroyed? Can we save truth as beauty and beauty as truth in our country only if truth becomes the chief concern of our serious citizens and their artists, architects and men of religion, independent of established authority? ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

Everyday, day & night, we hear the lies that September 11th is the worst tragedy, worst accident, and worst crime to ever been committed on American soil. We bear witness that the worst crime, the worst tragedy, that has ever taken place on American soil is not September 11th. It's not the twin towers. It's the holocaust that black folks been dealing with for 400 years. ~ Malik Zulu Shabazz

That night, I took a while falling asleep and when I did, I had a strange dream. She was sitting in my rocking chair and rocking herself, her dead eyes fixed on me. I lay on my bed, paralysed with fear, unable to move, unable to scream, my limbs refusing to move to my command. The room was suddenly freezing cold, the heater had probably stopped working in the night because the electricity supply had been cut and the inverter too had run out. At one point, I was uncertain whether I was dreaming or awake, or in that strange space between dreaming and wakefulness, where the soul wanders out of the body and explores other dimensions. What I knew was that I was chilled to the bones, chilled in a way that made it impossible for me to move myself, to lever myself to a sitting position in order to switch the bedside lamp on and check whether this was really happening. I could hear her in my head. Her voice was faint, feathery, and sibilant, as if she was whispering through a curtain of rain. Her words were indistinct, she called my name, she said words that pierced through my ears, words that meshed into ice slivers in my brain and when I thought finally that I would freeze to death an ice cold tiny body climbed into the quilt with me, putting frigidly chilly arms around me, and whispered, 'Mother, I'm cold.' Icicles shot up my spine, and I sat up, bolt upright in my bed, feeling the covers fall from me and a small indent in the mattress where something had been, a moment ago. There ~ Kiran Manral

Liraz may have captured Ziri's soul like a butterfly in a bottle, but that was only a formality. It was already hers.
And, clearly, judging by the state of her laugh-sobbing in Karou's arms, hers was his, too. ~ Laini Taylor

Character is the best mirror of the soul. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

People talk about Eisenhower's golden age.... It all happened without me. What is the vice presidency? The Constitution dictates only two duties: casting the deciding vote if the Senate is deadlocked and replacing the president if he dies or is impeached. apart from waiting for those two things to happen, you made the rest up and were duly forgotten by history. The exception being Aaron Burr, who shot someone, decisively lowering the bar for the rest of us.
What I remember is small pieces of the world: the West Wing, the insides of planes and hotel lobbies and conference rooms. My life was dinners with Pat and the children; airplane flights; placeholder meetings with foreign dignitaries during which I nodded and reminded them I had no power to make and agreement but would speak to the president. Stomach-turning formal breakfasts, speeches to party elders and tradesmen. I opened factories in Detroit and Akron, breathing the various stinks of canneries, slaughterhouses, or rubber plans and bestowing that vice presidential combination of glamour, flattery, and the tacit reminder that they didn't quite rate a visit from the top guy. ~ Austin Grossman

The reduction of political discourse to sound bites is one of the worst things that's happened in American political life. ~ John Silber

There are no backwaters where things can breed - our connectivity is so high and so global that there are no more Seattles and no more Haight-Ashburys. We've arrived at a level of commodification that may have negated the concept of counterculture. ~ William Gibson

Coquettes are, but too rare. It is a career that requires great abilities, infinite pains, a gay and airy spirit. 'T is the coquette who provides all the amusements,
suggests the riding-party, plans the picnic, gives and guesses charades, acts them. She is the stirring element amid the heavy congeries of social atoms,
the soul of the house, the salt of the banquet. ~ Benjamin Disraeli

As the African American theologian James Cone notes, "Far from being songs of passive resignation, the spirituals are black freedom songs which emphasize black liberation as consistent with divine revelation. ~ James Martin

Did you tackle that trouble that came your way
With a resolute heart and cheerful?
Or hide your face from the light of day
With a craven soul and fearful?
Oh, a trouble's a ton, or a trouble's an ounce,
Or a trouble is what you make it.
And it isn't the fact that you're hurt that counts,
But only how did you take it?

(Excerpt from "How Did You Die?") ~ Edmund Vance Cooke

My love is gone, carried away,
by the wind that shakes the willow,
and all the land is beaten hard,
by the wind that shakes the willow.
But I will hold her close to me
in heart and dearest memory,
and with her strength to steel my soul,
her love to warm my heart-strings,
I will stand where we once sang,
though cold wind shakes the willow. ~ Robert Jordan

Every soul is destined to be perfect, and every being, in the end, will attain the state of perfection. ~ Swami Vivekananda

Emotion is always multiplied in the art of a person who doesn't really show much emotion. It once expanded deep within his hidden soul, and following the downplay his audience is blown away. ~ Criss Jami

The largest outbreak of bird flu in American history was an H5N2 virus, which led to the deaths of 17 million domestic birds and cost the nation more than $400 million during an outbreak in Pennsylvania that started in 1983. ~ Michael Greger

More than illness or death, the American journalist fears standing alone against the whim of his owners or the prejudices of his audience. Deprive William Safire of the insignia of the New York Times, and he would have a hard time selling his truths to a weekly broadsheet in suburban Duluth. ~ Lewis H. Lapham

If it was that easy, the American military would have figured it out years ago. ~ Christopher Rankin

An item must have a soul, it must function properly, be nice to hold and a pleasure to look at ~ Kay Bojesen

It's a beautiful way to put it: Leave the poetry in what you make. When something becomes too polished, it loses its soul. It seems robotic. ~ Jason Fried

We are dying, we are dying, piecemeal our bodies are dying and our strength leaves us, and our soul cowers naked in the dark rain over the flood, cowering in the last branches of the tree of our life. ~ D.H. Lawrence

Lacking medicines and procedures that could do anything for them, the American Psychiatric and Psychological Associations decided to take homosexuality off the list of mental disorders and declare the alarming rise in the tide faggots as normal. ~ Bill Gaede

Technical perfection is insufficient. It is an orphan without the true soul of the dancer. ~ Sylvie Guillem

Perfect joy excludes even the very feeling of joy, for in the soul filled by the object no corner is left for saying 'I'. We cannot imagine such joys when they are absent, thus the incentive for seeking them is lacking. ~ Simone Weil

It is not the soul that speaks its mind, but the mind that speaks its soul, that will be heard. ~ Andrew Sabitov

I spend my days trying to remember what only my soul knows but my mind can't comprehend. ~ Raneem Kayyali

Miss Rudy, the former Harmony librarian, had single-handedly held off a siege of the town council bent on cutting her funds. She had locked the library doors and hid the only key in her bra, living on water from the toilet tank after the town had shut off water to the building to drive her out. She ate paste to keep up her strength. Oh, they had underestimated her. On the fourth day, the men of the council had capitulated, apologizing for cutting the funds, begging her to open the doors and come out. But she had stayed in the library an extra day, just to show them one could live on books, then marched out at noon on the fifth day, her head held high, and three pounds heavier. She had gained weight! When word got out, her picture made the cover of American Libraries magazine. Admiring letters poured in from librarians around the world – beaten down, beleaguered librarians who had drawn strength from her bravery. She answered each one in flowing, Palmer-method, handwritten script. ~ Philip Gulley

I am full of madness, i can't hide my fire
I burn for the things i love, my soul will never retire. ~ Nikki Rowe

At the end of the day, there are a hell of a lot of notes being played out there and I defy the average middle-American or the average punter to differentiate between them. ~ Jeff Beck

His arm slid around my shoulders and drew me to him. It was odd, sitting there under the veil of darkness, watching the neighborhood settle down. Lamps burned in windows. TVs flickered. A few houses down, the rhythmic thud of a basketball on concrete and muffled laughter alerted us to the only other people outside on this glorious fall night.

"This is a perfect date," I said.

He tensed. "You'd call it a date?"

"Sure. You wouldn't?"

He looked down at me, his eyes glittering in the faint light. "I thought American girls liked more formality in a date."

"More money is what you mean." I smiled. "It's a date. Don't argue with me."

"I never do. ~ Elizabeth Langston

There is something very quiet and reserved and pessimistic about Obama's temperament that is deeply un-American. There are those people who claim, "Oh, he wasn't born here" - all that is nonsense. ~ Jess Row

If you put your heart, mind and soul into it, there's nothing you can't do! ~ Jason A. Cheek

Until America begins to build a moral record in her dealings with the Indian people she should not try to fool the rest of the world about her intentions on other continents. America has always been a militantly imperialistic world power eagerly grasping for economic control over weaker nations. ~ Vine Deloria Jr.

Peace and humility is what the soul seeks. And how amazing all it must do is stop, pay attention, then listen to its father's voice. ~ C.C. Wyatt

You have to take the good with the bad. ~ American Proverb.

Detroit's so bad this year they might lose their bye week. ~ Dennis Miller

Awake, my soul! Stretch every nerve, And press with vigor on; A heavenly race demands thy zeal, And an immortal crown. ~ Philip Doddridge

In this world, we are surrounded by fast-paced, empty static energy. They're like the empty calories of the soul. You have empty calories for your body, like a bag of potato chips for example, then you have empty calories for your soul, which are found in the static energy that doesn't really add to our emotional, spiritual, mental experience of living our lives. We have magical moments of connection with people, with nature, with Spirit, but then we rush out of those moments all too fast, in order to go straight back into the busy lanes that are full of things not worthwhile! Empty energies! So when we do that, we forget our magical, nourishing soul moments all too fast and we start caring about things that we shouldn't care about too much, stepping outside of the moments of eternity that we encounter, and going back into the empty noise. So I think that we need to picture ourselves as rocks in the river; we can let all of that rush by us, while we stay fortified where we are, lingering in the warmness of the noontime sun, the chill of the dawn , the reflections of dusk - like a rock in a river - let it all just rush by. Be magic. ~ C. JoyBell C.

I understand you" is the soul behind "I Love You".
If this is missing, "I Love You" is empty. ~ Wordions

Without a doubt, American teenagers can perform at the top of the world on a sophisticated test of critical thinking. Students at traditional public high schools that took the test in Fairfax, Virginia, also trounced teenagers around the world. ~ Amanda Ripley

There's no question I am an idealist, which is another way of saying 'I am an American.' ~ Ronald Reagan

I've got a piece of the American Dream. I don't have a house, but I do have a new chandelier. Now I just have to build a house around it. ~ Jarod Kintz

Liberty is a soul's right to breathe. ~ Matt Damon