47 hits
No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.-- H. L. Mencken
The American public knows what it wants, and deserves to get it good and hard.-- H. L. Mencken
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."-- Theodore Roosevelt
"Confronted with the choice, the American people would choose the policeman's truncheon over the anarchist's bomb.-- Spiro T. Agnew
On an American Airlines package of nuts: Instructions: Open package, eat nuts.
In America, anybody can be president. That's one of the risks you take.-- Adlai Stevenson
In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs forever and ever.-- Oscar Wilde
"Our American professors like their literature clear, cold, pure and very dead."-- Sinclair Lewis
"We need a president who's fluent in at least one language."-- Buck Henry
"That's the trouble with women these days. They act like men and want to be treated like women" (An American in Paris)
America isn't easy. America is advanced citizenship. You've got to want it bad, because it's going to put up a fight. It's going to say, "You want free speech? Let's see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil; who's standing center stage, advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim that this land is the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country cannot just be a flag. The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest."
Now show me that. Defend that. Celebrate that in your classrooms. Then you can stand up and sing about the land of the free.-- President Andrew Shepard (The American President)
Bagdikian's Observation:
Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach's 'St. Matthew Passion' on a ukelele.
"It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress."-- Mark Twain
"Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial 'we'."-- Mark Twain
"Americans have different ways of saying things. They say 'elevator', we say 'lift' ... they say 'President', we say 'stupid psychopathic git'...."-- Alexi Sayle
All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.-- Carl Sagan
98% of us Americans are hard-working people. It's the other 2% that give us a bad reputation. Then again, we did elect them.
Anybody that wants the presidency so much that he would spend two years campaigning and organizing for it should not be trusted with the office.
The simple rights, the civil liberties from generations of struggle must not be just fine words for patriotic holidays, words we subvert on weekdays, but living, honored rules of conduct amongst us... I'm glad the American Civil Liberties Union gets indignant, and I hope this will always be so.-- Adlai Stevenson
Dustin Pons, an American high-school student who attended a Soviet school for three weeks, as quoted in the New York Times: "American teenagers are more socially advanced. For instance, in their free time Soviets would rather read a book or walk in the park or play the piano. American teenagers would probably go out and watch TV, go to a movie, or something more actively inclined." ("The Progressive")
That seems to point up a significant difference between Europeans and Americans. A European says: "I can't understand this, what's wrong with me?" An American says: "I can't understand this, what's wrong with him?"-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)
The public seems incapable of distinguishing between your garden variety idiot and your genuine lunatic. It is the same confusion the public has had over the last five Presidents.-- Mark Leeper
"Ah," said the president [Reagan] with great lucidity, "It's true we shipped weapons to Iran, but they were defensive weapons."
If the man had a brain, he'd play with it.-- Molly Ivins
"All the president is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing, and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway."-- Harry S. Truman
"In America--as elsewhere--free speech is confined to the dead."-- Mark Twain
"It doesn't require any particular bravery to stand on the floor of the Senate and urge our boys in Vietnam to fight harder, and if this war mushrooms into a major conflict and a hundred thousand young Americans are killed, it won't be U. S. Senators who die. It will be American soldiers who are too young to qualify for the senate."
-- George McGovern
Regrettable Necessity, n:
An avoidable atrocity. The term is often employed by presidents and prime ministers when announcing bombings of civilian targets and invasions of small countries.-- Chaz Bufe (The Devil's Dictionaries)
"America wasn't founded so that we could all be better. America was founded so we could all be anything we damn well please."-- P.J. O'Rourke
"In America sex is an obsession; in other parts of the world it is a fact."-- Marlene Dietrich
The decline in American pride, patriotism, and piety can be directly attributed to the extensive reading of so-called 'science fiction' by our young people. This poisonous rot about creatures not of God's making, societies of 'aliens' without a good Christian among them, and raw sex between unhuman beings with three heads and God alone knows what sort of reproductive apparatus keeps our young people from realizing the true will of God.-- Jerry Falwell (Reader's Digest, 1985)
America was founded by drug smugglers -- rum was the drug, but smugglers nonetheless.
In America you can go on the air and kid the politicians, and the politicians can go on the air and kid the people.-- Groucho Marx
The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make us wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them we are missing.-- Gamel Abdel Nasser
No, you may not speak freely. This is America. We have a high moral hypocrisy to uphold.-- Shannon Thomas Pricket
"Americans are benevolently ignorant about Canada, while Canadians are malevolently well informed about the United States."-- J. Bartlett Brebner
America is like a melting pot. The people at the bottom get burned, and the scum floats to the top.
"In America, through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but nothing to choose from."-- Peter Alexander Ustinov
"I was recently on a tour of Latin America, and the only regret I have is that I didn't study my Latin harder in school so I could converse with those people."-- Dan Quayle
"The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy."-- Louis Kronenberger