americans

There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right it is the ideal American who is all wrong.

The real America that Whitman proclaimed and Thoreau decoded.

Let's talk sense to the American people. Let's tell them the truth that there are no gains without pains.

The Americans believe they answered all first questions in 1776: since then they've just been hammering out the practical details.

Delaware: a state that has three counties when the tide is out and two when it is in.

Nothing ever gets settled in this town (Washington). It's not like running a company or even a university. It's a seething debating society in which the debate never stops in which people never give up including me and that's the atmosphere in which you administer.

The President spends most of his time kissing people on the cheek in order to get them to do what they ought to do without getting kissed.

Americans are like a rich father who wishes he knew how to give his son the hardships that made him rich.

After twenty annual visits I am still surprised each time I return to see this giant asparagus bed of alabaster and rose and green skyscrapers.

The most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism but February.

Washington is a city of people doing badly what shouldn't be done at all.

A natural New Yorker is a native of the present tense.

Thou oh my country hast thy foolish ways Too apt to purr at every stranger's praise.

You say to your soldier 'Do this' and he does it. But I am obliged to say to the American 'This is why you ought to do this' and then he does it.

I come from a state that raises corn and cotton and cockleburs and Democrats and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I am from Missouri. You have got to show me.

That strange blend of the commercial traveller the missionary and the barbarian conqueror which was the American abroad.

Ours is the country where in order to sell your product you don't so much point out its merits as you first work like hell to sell yourself.

The lusts of the flesh can be gratified anywhere it is not this sort of licence that distinguishes New York. It is rather a lust of the total ego for recognition even for eminence. More than elsewhere everybody here wants to be Somebody.