American Tradition Quotes

There's probably more in the American tradition than people give the place credit for. ~ Donald Judd

If we move away from the American tradition of lawyers defending those with whom they vehemently disagree
as we temporarily did during the McCarthy period
we weaken our commitment to the rule of law ... So beware of an approach which limits advocacy to that which is approved by the standards of political correctness. ~ Alan Dershowitz

Our American tradition of neighbor helping neighbor has always been one of our greatest strengths and most noble traditions. ~ Ronald Reagan

In view of the tide of religiosity engulfing a once secular republic it is refreshing to be reminded by Freethinkers that free thought and skepticism are robustly in the American tradition. After all the Founding Fathers began by omitting God from the American Constitution. ~ Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

The gratification of helping others is a very American tradition and a Judeo-Christian tradition. Now it is great to see young people creating funds and giving back in all sorts of productive ways. It's a terrifically satisfying thing. ~ Evelyn Lauder

The African-American tradition, in the main, is very, very church-based, very, very Christian. It accepts, you know, certain narratives about the world. I didn't really have that present in my house. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

An auctioneer is such a uniquely American thing. I keep thinking in my head, perhaps it's not as American as I think, but it feels so Southern. It feels so American. Like, hundreds of years of American tradition is involved in it. ~ Jack White

The Anglo-American tradition is much more linear than the European tradition. If you think about writers like Borges, Calvino, Perec or Marquez, they're not bound in the same sort of way. They don't come out of the classic 19th-century novel, which is where all the problems start. 19th-century novels are fabulous and we should all read them, but we shouldn't write them. ~ Jeanette Winterson

I've always been interested in photographing traditions and customs - especially in America. The prom is an American tradition, a rite of passage that has always been one of the most important rituals of American youth. It is a day in our lives that we never forget - a day full of hopes and dreams for our future. ~ Mary Ellen Mark

Is the American tradition of self-reliance disappearing? That's a painful question for conservatives to ponder. After all, we're dedicated to reducing the role of government and promoting individual freedom and opportunity. But the facts, while sad, are clear: More Americans today depend more heavily on government than ever before. ~ Edwin Feulner

There was no singles problem until singles got so single-minded that they stopped wasting time with anyone ineligible. Before that, it was understood that one of society's main tasks was matchmaking. People with lifelong friendships and ties to local nonprofessional organizations did not have to fear that isolation would accompany retirement, old age, or losing a spouse. Overburdened householders could count on the assistance not only of their own extended families, but of the American tradition of neighborliness. ~ Judith Martin

Ever since the 1860s when photographers travelled the American West and brought photographs of scenic wonders back to the people on the East Coast of America we have had a North American tradition of landscape photography used for the environment. ~ Galen Rowell

Settling other people's land is an American tradition. ~ Ariel Gore

Curtailment of free speech is rationalized on grounds that a more compelling American tradition forbids criticism of the government when the nation is at war ... Nothing can be more destructive of our fundamental democratic traditions than the vicious effort to silence dissenters. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Another term for preventive war is aggressive war - starting wars because someday somebody might do something to us. That is not part of the American tradition. ~ Ron Paul

It is in the American tradition to stand up for one's rights
even if the new way to stand up for one's rights is to sit down. ~ John F. Kennedy

Come on, it's an American tradition. Apple soup? Mom's homemade chicken pie?'
She chuckled in spite of herself, then winced. 'It's apple pie and Mom's homemade chicken soup. But you didn't do badly, for a start. ~ L.J.Smith

For us to ignore by inaction the slaughter of American civilians and American soldiers, whether in nightclubs or airline terminals, is simply not in the American tradition. Self-defense is not only our right, it is our duty. ~ Ronald Reagan

The Bouviers and the Lees alike operated within the great American tradition of immigrant ambition, which held that in making yourself anew, you had the right to embellish the past. ~ Alice Kaplan

And I should like to assure you, my Islamic friends, that under the American Constitution, under American tradition, and in American hearts, this Center, this place of worship, is just as welcome as could be a similar edifice of any other religion. Indeed, America would fight with her whole strength for your right to have here your own church and worship according to your own conscience. This concept is indeed a part of America, and without that concept we would be something else than what we are. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

There is an increasing push to compartmentalize faith separately from our life in the public square - and it's not possible - at least, it's not possible if we continue the American tradition of true individual freedom, which also implies individual responsibility. Without an objective moral standard, that's not possible. ~ Mike Huckabee

In the Native American tradition ... a man, if he's a mature adult, nurtures life. He does rituals that will help things grow, he helps raise the kids, and he protects the people. His entire life is toward balance and cooperativeness. The ideal of manhood is the same as the ideal of womanhood. You are autonomous, self-directing, and responsible for the spiritual, social and material life of all those with whom you live. ~ Paula Gunn Allen

The only way to be true to our American tradition is to maintain absolute governmental neutrality regarding religious beliefs and practices. ~ Bill Bradley

The only guide which I feel that I can follow is not the fluctuating dicta of those who are victors in the battle for popularity at a given moment, but my own understanding of the American tradition in which I was brought up. ~ Jane Jacobs

Well, first of all, I don't want to debate the word conservative, but by my definition, a conservative is someone who wants to conserve the Constitution of the United States and the American tradition and law that no one is above the law. ~ Dan Rather

The great American tradition is one of pluralism, not exclusive secularism. The strength of our country is reflected in the contributions that we all make to the common good. ~ Donald Wuerl

It's like an American tradition. A person gets successful and then he's supposed to change for the worse. It's silly. ~ Barbra Streisand

We do Him [God] honor in our pledge of allegiance, in all our public ceremonies. There's nothing wrong with that. It is in the best of American traditions, and don't let anybody tell you otherwise. I think we have to fight that tendency of the secularists to impose it on all of us through the Constitution. ~ Antonin Scalia

To say that the Afro American created jazz doesn't mean anything bad about Anglo Americans, and I always teach my younger jazz musicians that at this point the entirety of the American tradition is your heritage, and you need to know it. ~ Wynton Marsalis

A Trump presidency will turn the economy around and restore the great American tradition of giving each new generation hope for brighter opportunities than those of the generation that came before. ~ Ivanka Trump

It is within the established American tradition of satire, if America surrenders on this point, the freedom of speech is a relic of history. ~ Pamela Geller

For 180 years, we voted in English. That is the true American tradition, and this amendment is true to our heritage, not what has existed unnaturally for the last 20 years. ~ Spencer Bachus

The freedom to be able to offer education, human services, and health care in accordance with our own identity as a church should not be denied us simply because there may be the perception of a political majority who favors a new understanding of the American tradition of pluralism. ~ Donald Wuerl

We use a Native American tradition of the talking stick. You sit and pass it around and whoever has the stick has to talk. Some people just hold it. Others really share. ~ Lisa Bonet

America's poor and working-class people have long been subject to invasive surveillance, midnight raids, and punitive public policy that increase the stigma and hardship of poverty. During the nineteenth century, they were quarantined in county poorhouses. During the twentieth century, they were investigated by caseworkers, treated like criminals on trial. Today, we have forged what I call a digital poorhouse from databases, algorithms, and risk models. It promises to eclipse the reach and repercussions of everything that came before.

Like earlier technological innovations in poverty management, digital tracking and automated decision-making hid poverty from the professional middle-class public and give the nation the ethical distance it needs to make inhuman choices: who gets food and who starves, who has housing and who remains homeless, and which families are broken up by the state. The digital poorhouse is part of a long American tradition. We manage the individual poor in order to escape our shared responsibility for eradicating poverty. ~ Virginia Eubanks

The word is important in Native American tradition. You speak the path on which you walk. Your words make the trail. ~ Diane Glancy

Acknowledge that a more closely integrated Europe is no longer an unqualified American interest. ~ Richard Perle

In our modern world today, we may seem like drowning men because of the loss of much of our spiritual tradition. ~ Thomas Yellowtail

The desire from those abroad to join our ranks is overwhelming. Tens of millions have applied for the limited amount of diversity visas available every year, illustrating the demand and need to maintain this vital path to American citizenship. ~ Cedric Richmond

This obsession with leadership ... It's not neutral; it's American, this idea of the heroic leader who comes in on a white horse to save the day. I think it's killing American companies. ~ Henry Mintzberg

Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love. - Hamilton Wright Mabie (1846 - 1916), American essayist ~ Susan Wiggs

There is a tradition in Southern cooking of recipes handed down for generations. And when I make my grandmother's strawberry pie - she is gone on now - I feel her right with me. ~ Kimberly Schlapman

beyond their right - and now they would be made to pay for it. Envy was being acted out, as never before.'62 It led to the murder of six million Jews in the Second World War. Today, I find envy laced through the statements of European and Indian intellectuals about America. Arundhati Roy's essay after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington is an example. Like many anti-American intellectuals writing in the days after the attack, Roy claimed that it was the direct result of American foreign policy - the implication being that America somehow deserved what had happened. There is widespread anti-American sentiment in the world which regards the United States as arrogant, indifferent to human suffering, consumerist, and contemptuous of international law. Much of this is probably correct, but I find that some of it is inspired by envy of America's success. ~ Gurcharan Das

We need a new Latin American policy that is bold - different. We need to focus on building civil society, focus on the lack of infrastructure. We need look at ways to foster economic opportunity. There needs to be a more comprehensive economic vision in the region. ~ Mel Martinez

American is the first democratic nation-state. ~ Stephen Ambrose

Michigan, with its delicious American name. How lucky one must be to live there. ~ Gary Shteyngart

I'll say American for now. I really have no preference, though. Nationality is nothing. It's all about the girl - but she has to be curvy! ~ Daniel Radcliffe

It takes quite a bit of nerve for Democrats to complain about inflation. This reminds me of germs complaining about the disease. ~ Spiro T. Agnew

Ray Charles, in his own way, it's like at the beginning, Ray Charles changed American music, not once but twice. ~ Taylor Hackford

Was an American archetype, the bad guy with the big heart. ~ Waylon Jennings

How early the American cause turned to the sea. ~ Dudley W. Knox

Today, families like the one I grew up in still believe in that American dream. But as President Obama says, it's a make-or-break moment for the middle class. Mitt Romney's plans would make things worse. ~ Chuck Schumer

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 maintain the ascendancy of the Constitution over the lawmaking majority is the great and essential point on which the success of the [American] system must depend; unless that ascendancy can be preserved, the necessary consequence must be that the laws will supersede the Constitution; and, finally, the will of the Executive, by influence of its patronage, will supersede the laws ... ~ John C. Calhoun

That day in Chartres they had passed through town and watched women kneeling at the edge of the water, pounding clothes against a flat, wooden board. Yves had watched them for a long time. They had wandered up and down the old crooked streets, in the hot sun; Eric remembered a lizard darting across a wall; and everywhere the cathedral pursued them. It is impossible to be in that town and not be in the shadow of those great towers; impossible to find oneself on those plains and not be troubled by that cruel and elegant, dogmatic and pagan presence. The town was full of tourists, with their cameras, their three-quarter coats, bright flowered dresses and shirts, their children, college insignia, Panama hats, sharp, nasal cries, and automobiles crawling like monstrous gleaming bugs over the laming, cobblestoned streets. Tourist buses, from Holland, from Denmark, from Germany, stood in the square before the cathedral. Tow-haired boys and girls, earnest, carrying knapsacks, wearing khaki-colored shorts, with heavy buttocks and thighs, wandered dully through the town. American soldiers, some in uniform, some in civilian clothes, leaned over bridges, entered bistros in strident, uneasy, smiling packs, circled displays of colored post cards, and picked up meretricious mementos, of a sacred character. All of the beauty of the town, all the energy of the plains, and all the power and dignity of the people seemed to have been sucked out of them by the cathedral. It was as though the cath ~ James Baldwin

I had the notion that I wanted to write the great dirty American novel, so I went to Roanoke College on the GI Bill. ~ Tom T. Hall

You don't have to be African American to really enjoy 'Frisky Business'. But as far as being black, a lot of people in New York have been stopped and frisked, so that hits home for them. ~ Jessica Williams

American journalism's crazy old aunt in the attic. ~ Helen Thomas

The Americans called theirs the Officers Club but the Canadians called ours the Officers Mess. The American term was the more honest; ours the more accurate. Drunken officers at play are messy. ~ R.J. Childerhose

If people see North American hockey and they see violence and brutality and it's not so interesting, that sends a message too about your culture. ~ Gabe Polsky

As a guiding principle I believe that every poem must be its own sole freshly created universe, and therefore have no belief n 'tradition' or a common myth-kitty or casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets, which last I find unpleasantly like the talk of literary understrappers letting you see they know the right people. ~ Philip Larkin

The American public's a lot more sophisticated than we all give them credit for. And on complicated issues, I'm going to give them straight answers. And if it takes more than three minutes, I'm going to do it. ~ Joe Biden

If you're going to play the game properly you'd better know every rule. ~ Barbara Jordan

My teenage children watched Senator Clinton on the Today Show, mouths agape. They attended our local caucus with me and saw hundreds of our friends and neighbors gathered in the elementary school gym on that Sunday afternoon, despite an ugly Maine snowstorm. They listened to the thoughtful searching debates and saw us cast our votes. How could anyone suggest we didn't know exactly what we were doing? 'What's the point of electing someone who doesn't believe in the American people?' they asked. 'If she wants to ignore us now when she's only a candidate, what will she do as the President?' ~ Shoshana Zuboff

We cannot get serious about helping the private sector create quality jobs without focusing first on the main drivers of our economy - the American middle class and those struggling to enter it. ~ Paul Tonko

Is anything more needed to convince Catholics that the sola gratia, as generally understood among Protestants, in the sense we have seen that they give it, is perfectly in accord with Catholic tradition? And those Protestants who see, in the passage we first quoted, the very heart of their faith and life as Christians, can they seriously question that the Church does justice to all that is essential and positive in their "protestation," once they have read these other texts?

-The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism, 1956 ~ Louis Bouyer

I got the feeling: It's time to do a Marco Polo story. I felt like everything was lining up right because long-form television series were becoming to me like the new great American novel. ~ John Fusco

Art photography, although long since legitimized by all the conventional discourses of fine art, seems destined perpetually to recapitulate all the rituals of the arriviste. Inasmuch as one of those rituals consists of the establishment of suitable ancestry, a search for distinguished bloodlines, it inevitably happens that photographic history and criticism are more concern with notions of tradition and continuity than with those of rupture and change. ~ Abigail Solomon-Godeau

Understatement has become part of the tradition. A proposal to build a history room to house the football team's memorabilia was immediately shelved when many former players complained. What makes this program so special is what you carry in your heart, they argued, not what you hang on the wall. ~ Neil Hayes