American Spirit Quotes

I know Great Spirit is looking down upon me from above, and will hear what I say ... ~ Sitting Bull

On the issues of religious liberty, the Supreme Court continues to scrape against the bedrock of the American spirit. ~ Gary Bauer

For all the huffing and blowing we get about rugged individualism, the American spirit and the American experiment always have had at their heart the notion that the government is all of us and that, therefore, the government may keep things in trust for all of us. ~ Charlie Pierce

Baseball just a came as simple as a ball and bat. Yet, as complex as the American spirit it symbolizes. A sport, a business and sometimes almost even a religion. ~ Ernie Harwell

Poetry at large in America is naturally a reflection of the American system and culture. That's my possibly narrow view of it, or reductive view. But I think for as many portals for critical consciousness in the poetry world and in the American spirit that exist, there's also an over-arching, dominant mirroring, in poetry, of the corporate structure, the capitalist enterprise. ~ Fady Joudah

The great thing is, Internet allows you to create your own job, not just look for jobs other people are going to give you. And that, combined with the American spirit, I think, is going to help us come out of the recession faster than other countries. And I think it's going to help Africa come out of, you know, a century of slump. ~ Esther Dyson

Baseball is the exponent of American Courage, Confidence, Combativeness, American Dash, Discipline, Determination, American Energy, Eagerness, Enthusiasm, American Pluck, Persistency, Performance, American Spirit, Sagacity, Success, American Vim, Vigor, Virility. ~ Albert Goodwill Spalding

My library card. Every hurdle I've faced, I have researched my way over at a library. I'm grateful for that part of the American spirit that believes every citizen should have access to books. ~ Sarah Bird

Country music is the poetry of the American spirit. ~ Steve Maraboli

When I hit around 65, 66, I started to feel tremendous worth and incredible personal esteem. I was becoming very cognisant of my contribution to the American spirit of helping your fellow man and all of the good stuff. ~ Jerry Lewis

I like motivational books, because I like the go-getting American spirit - your destiny is in your own hands, life is what you make it, don't accept your limitations, jump before you're pushed, leap before you look. ~ Louise Mensch

Here at home, when Americans were standing in long lines to give blood after the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we squandered an obvious opportunity to make service a noble cause again, and rekindle an American spirit of community. ~ Joe Biden

There was one woman who had a giant sign and on it, it just said, 'America Is Better Than Abortion.' I think she meant that America was too good a place for the horror of abortion. But instead, it sounded like she had weighed both - the American spirit and getting an abortion and decided that American spirit better. I think it is a bad idea to have grammatically ambiguous protest signs. ~ Eugene Mirman

my father liked his Indian talk about the Great Spirit," Ridgeway said. "All these years late, I prefer the American spirit, the one that called us from the Old World to the New, to conquer and build and civilize. And destroy that what needs to be destroyed. To lift up the lesser races. If not lift up, subjugate. And if not subjugate, exterminate. One destiny by divine perscription--the American imperative. ~ Colson Whitehead

Pulling out onto the highway I noticed a stone pillar commemorating the Donner Party. They were a true testament to the American spirit, push forward at all costs and eat the dead when necessary. Wasn't that the American dream in a nutshell. ~ Josh Stallings

You know that American dream and American spirit of innovation we always talk about? Turns out, the bulk of it was built by people who came to America from somewhere else, not people born American. We have no birthright or natural lock on these things. ~ Sarah Lacy

The Turk aroused my antipathies almost at once. He had a mania for logic which infuriated me. It was bad logic too. And like the others, all of whom I violently disagreed with, I found in him an expression of the American spirit at its worst. Progress was their obession. More machines, more efficiency, more capital, more comforts – that was their whole talk. I asked them if they had heard of the millions who were unemployed in America. They ignored the question. I asked them if they realized how empty, restless and miserable the American people with all their machinemade luxuries and comforts. They were impervious to my sarcasm. What they had wanted was success - money, power, a place in the sun. ~ Henry Miller

No place epitomizes the American experience and the American spirit more than New York City. ~ Michael Bloomberg

The American spirit is stronger than stone and mortar, tougher than steel and glass, and more enduring than any pain or suffering that can be inflicted on our national conscience. ~ Olympia Snowe

Don't let anyone tell you that America's best days are behind her - that the American spirit has been vanquished. We've seen it triumph too often in our lives to stop believing in it now. ~ Ronald Reagan

The American spirit wears no political label. In service to others and yes, in sacrifice for our country, there are no Republicans; there are no Democrats; there are only Americans. ~ John F. Kerry

All roads lead past shooting ranges, liquor stores, and gay bars. Wanderlust is part of the American Spirit. ~ Andrew Smith

Why did mainstream America come to accept marriage equality? Gay leaders had made a convincing case that gay families were like straight families and should have the same rights. The American spirit of fair play had been invoked. ~ Edmund White

This country of ours has more wealth than any nation, but that's not what makes us rich. We have the most powerful military on Earth, but that's not what makes us strong. Our universities and our culture are the envy of the world, but that's not what keeps the world coming to our shores.
It is that American spirit - that American promise - that pushes us forward even when the path is uncertain; that binds us together in spite of our differences; that makes us fix our eye not on what is seen, but what is unseen, that better place around the bend ~ Barack Obama

How can we salute - encourage the American spirit? That means many different things to many different people. ~ Desiree Rogers

What the Founding Fathers created in the Constitution is the most magnificent government on the face of the Earth, and the reason is this: because it was intended to preserve the American society and the American spirit, not to transform it or destroy it. ~ Mark Levin

We need to revitalize the American spirit. People are always asking 'What would the founding fathers do,' but I have yet to witness a single séance. ~ Bauvard

With the advances of science he saw moral perspective being lost. Science and technology practically took on the role of religion, so that man was actually worshipping at the altar of science, a fallacy, if not a heresy, that could lead to the undoing of the American spirit. ~ Winston Groom

Nothing so challenges the American spirit as tackling the biggest job on earth ... Americans are stimulated by the big job; the Panama Canal, Boulder Dam, Grand Coulee, Lower Colorado River developments, the tallest building in the world, the mightiest battleship. ~ Lyndon B. Johnson

Sharing in God's blessings is at the heart of Thanksgiving and at the core of the American spirit. ~ William J. Clinton

Emerson then incarnated the moral optimism, the progress, and the energy of the American spirit. ~ Howard Mumford Jones

Our resources may be finite, but our will is infinite, and I am confident that if we come together and summon that great American spirit once again, we will meet the challenges of our time and write the next great chapter in our American story. ~ Barack Obama

When distinction of any kind, even intellectual distinction, is somehow resented as a betrayal of the American spirit of equal opportunity for all, the result must be just this terror of individualistic impulses setting us apart, either above or below our neighbours; just this determination to obey without questioning and to subscribe with passion to the conventions and traditions. The dilemma becomes a very real one: How can this sense of democratic equality be made compatible with respect for exceptional personalities or great minds? How can democracy, as we understand it today, with its iron repression of the free spirit, its monotonous standardisation of everything, learn to cherish an intellectual aristocracy without which any nation runs the risk of becoming a civilisation of the commonplace and the second-rate? ~ Harold Edmund Stearns

Created man cannot become a son of God and god by grace through deification, unless he is first through his own free choice begotten in the Spirit by means of the self-loving and independent power dwelling naturally in him. ~ Maximus The Confessor

Dancing and ballets would undoubtedly take on a new lease on life, if the customs established by a spirit of fear and jealousy did not in some way close the path of glory ... ~ Jean-Georges Noverre

The Gypsy heart is full of wonder, their souls deep with dreams and their inspiration full of mystery. ~ Karl Wiggins

I am delighted to be joining 'Guardian U.S.'s team as a weekly columnist, and to have the chance to address American and global current events on its distinguished platform. 'Guardian U.S.' brings the 'Guardian's hard-hitting investigative brand to a new focus on American news and opinion. ~ Naomi Wolf

Anyone believing the TPP is good for Americans take note: The foreign subsidiaries of U.S.-based corporations could just as easily challenge any U.S. government regulation they claim unfairly diminishes their profits - say, a regulation protecting American consumers from unsafe products or unhealthy foods, investors from fraudulent securities or predatory lending, workers from unsafe working conditions, taxpayers from another bailout of Wall Street, or the environment from toxic emissions. ~ Robert Reich

Herbs, vials, and crap," I grumble. "Where are the massive weapons and spirit fighting spears?"
"So impatient," Cooper says, mocking, and goes to pick up a tube filled with powder. "You know, these herbs and vials and crap are important."
"Yes, because crap always sounds necessary. ~ Brandy Nacole

[Farmer] went to dozens of American and Canadian universities and colleges, preaching his O for the P [Preferential Option for the Poor] gospel, and to South Africa, where he debated a World Bank official at an international AIDS conference. "Africans must learn to curb their sexual appetites," the banker remarked, and Farmer replied, "I want to talk about other bankers, not the World Bankers, but bankers in general. My suspicion is they're not getting a lot of sex, because they spend a lot of time screwing the poor. ~ Tracy Kidder

For all beings within this universal kingdom, their magnetic north rests in genuine mirth. ~ Gabriel Brunsdon

Another Chief remembered that since the Great Father promised them that they would never be moved they had been moved five times. "I think you had better put the Indians on wheels," he said sardonically, "and you can run them about whenever you wish. ~ Dee Brown

What you could say, and what I do argue in the book, is that he doesn't have as much concern for the lives of Iraqis as he does for the lives of Americans, or even frozen American embryos. ~ Peter Singer

Dance with the waves,
move with the sea.
Let the rhythm of the water
set your soul free. ~ Christy Ann Martine

When blood is once cold and stagnant, it is no longer human blood; when flesh is once dead, it is no longer that flesh which we desire in our lovers and respect in our friends. The grace, the attraction, the terror, have all gone from it with the animating spirit. Accustom yourself to look upon it with composure; for if my scheme is practicable you will have to live some days in constant proximity to that which now so greatly horrifies you. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

The much-vaunted sex appeal of American women is drawn from films, reviews and pin-ups, and is in large print fictitious. A recent medical survey in the United States showed that 75% of young American women are without strong sexual feeling and instead of satisfying their libido they seek pleasure narcissistically in exhibitionism, vanity, and the cult of fitness and health in a sterile sense. ~ Julius Evola

In terms of having the American people look at the court and think of it as being fair and appropriate for our nation, it helps to have women, plural, on the court. ~ Sandra Day O'Connor

I stopped remembering the past and started visualising my future, the only thing left I could hold onto was hope; that the courage I have found along the way, is what will see me through. ~ Nikki Rowe

I have this ability to find this hidden talent in people that sometimes even they didn't know they had. ~ Berry Gordy

This is my only and permanent complaint, that vulgar people, empty of the Spirit of God, want to judge solely by their human thinking what they listen to or read in the Bible, which has been pronounced and written by the Holy Spirit and in the Holy Spirit. ~ Meister Eckhart

Too often in the post-9/11 world, when the time has come to translate the moral, and essentially progressive, roots of foreign policy idealism into plans for American action, liberals have said, 'Duck. ~ Richard Just

To live a hard life was to make solid and impregnable every way in, until no openings remained and the soul hid in darkness, and no one else could hear its screams, its railing at injustice, its long, agonizing stretches of sadness. Hardness without created hardness within.

Sadness was, she well knew, not something that could be cured. It was not, in fact, a failing, not a flaw, not an illness of spirit. Sadness was never without reason, and to assert that it marked some kind of dysfunction did little more than prove ignorance or, worse, cowardly evasiveness in the one making the assertion. As if happiness was the only legitimate way of being. As if those failing at it needed to be locked away, made soporific with medications; as if the causes of sadness were merely traps and pitfalls in the proper climb to blissful contentment, things to be edged round or bridged, or leapt across on wings of false elation.

Scillara knew better. She had faced her own sadness often enough. Even when she discovered her first means of escaping it, in durhang, she'd known that such an escape was simply a flight from feelings that existed legitimately. She'd just been unable to permit herself any sympathy for such feelings, because to do so was to surrender to their truth.

Sadness belonged. As rightful as joy, love, grief and fear. All conditions of being.

Too often people mistook the sadness in others for self-pity, and in so doing revealed their own ha ~ Steven Erikson

There's no better way to energize your body, mind, and spirit than by taking care of yourself. ~ Stephanie Tourles

The triumph of the human spirit," the new nursing sister said, new enough to talk about "positive outcomes" and "enhancement programmes" - emollient management-speak, meaningless to most of the residents of Poplar Hill, who were either dying or demented or both. It was called a "care home" but there was precious little of either to be had when you were run by a profit-based health-care provider employing minimum-wage staff. ~ Kate Atkinson

When I think back, I felt like I had the life that a lot of white American kids grew up with in the suburbs in the States. I started noticing, as Apartheid's grip weakened, that we had more and more black kids at school; I had more and more black friends. But I never really saw a separation between myself and the black kids at school. ~ St. Lucia

Americans are falling out of the middle class, not into it. And they deserve relief. I absolute support extending the Bush tax cuts for those who work the hardest and invest the most in our economy - the real drivers of American growth, the middle class. ~ Paul Tonko

Indigenous people have been tracking the same 'psychic virus' for many centuries, calling it 'wetiko' in Cree (windigo in Ojibwa, wintiko in Powhatan), a term that refers to a biologically wicked person or spirit who terrorizes others by means of evil acts. ~ Paul Levy

The African American community is so under-served in the entertainment industry. ~ Lance Reddick

I know an American family that spent several years living in England. They had one son, who was an average student: not great, but not terrible. When the family returned home to the United States, the parents enrolled him in the local public school. Mom was startled by the continual drumbeat from teachers and other parents: "Maybe your son has ADHD. Have you considered trying a medication?" She told me, "It was weird, like everybody was in on this conspiracy to medicate my son. In England, none of the kids is on medication. Or if they are, it's a secret. But I really don't think many are. Here it seems like almost all the kids are on medication. Especially the boys. ~ Leonard Sax

We can live tough lives, but the human spirit is stronger, seemingly, than anything. There is redemption, hope, and love. All different forms of heartbreak, but beyond all that there is hope, there is love. There is beauty and bliss. ~ Hugh Jackman

In Indian Country," he says, "we have a different sense of time. I'm learning and you're learning - and more will. ~ Gloria Steinem

Only by providing leading-edge human capital and knowledge capital can American continue to maintain a high standard of living, including providing national security for its citizens. ~ Norman Ralph Augustine

In an artistic sense, cool came to refer to someone with a signature artistic style so integral as to exude an authentic mode-of-being in the world: Miles, Bogart, Brando, Eastwood, Greco, Elvis, Lady Day, Sinatra. Such a person created something from nothing and gave the world some new artistic or psychological 'equipment for living,' to use a phrase of Kenneth Burke's. A signature style is yours and can only be carried by you: it cannot be abstracted except through dilution and commodification since it reflects an individual's complex personal experience. In this sense, cool was 'making a dollar out of fifteen cents,' to pull another phrase from the Africa-American vernacular. Lester Young was once at a bar when a tenor saxophone solo floated out of the jukebox. 'That's me,' he said happily. As he listened his mood collapsed - he realized it was one of his many imitators. 'No, that's not me,' he said sadly. To steal someone else's sound or style and capitalize on it has always been un-cool, the pretense of posers. ~ Joel Dinerstein

Thus men of more enlighten'd genius and more intrepid spirit must compose themselves to the risque of public censure, and the contempt of their jealous contemporaries, in order to lead ignorant and prejudic'd minds into more happy and successful methods. ~ Jon Jones

I don't really know what 'American' is. I know what Ukrainian is. We're happy Slavic people. We're not Dostoyevsky Slavic people. There's this sense of 'pick it up, get your hands dirty, make the best of it, celebrate.' ~ Nina Arianda

Heade's calm is unsteady, storm-stirred; we respond in our era to its hint of the nervous and the fearful. His weather is interior weather, in a sense, and he perhaps was, if far from the first to portray a modern mood, an ambivalent mood tinged with dread and yet imbued with a certain lightness.The mood could even be said to be religious: not an aggressive preachment of God's grandeur but a kind of Zen poise and acceptance, represented by the small sedentary or plodding foreground figures that appear uncannily at peace as the clouds blacken and the lightning flashes. ~ John Updike

Reach your destiny, chase your dream. And everything you do must full of your spirit. ~ Miraeniuzz Sanaf

It isn't until you come to a spiritual understanding of who you are - not necessarily a religious feeling, but deep down, the spirit within - that you can begin to take control. ~ Oprah Winfrey

Anarchy!" Tony confirmed in sort of a laugh.
"Sometimes I think, you know, if there were not cops, I would be fine, and I probably would. I was taught right from wrong when I was a kid. But the truth is, I drive completely different when there is a cop behind me than when there isn't."
And what Tony and I were talking about is true. It is hard for us to admit we have a sin nature because we live in a 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. Is is as the founding fathers knew, intrinsically, that the soul of man, unwatched, is perverse. ~ Donald Miller