America - christiansquoting.org.uk

Americans don't dine. They gobble, gulp, and go.
A 19th European traveler, quoted in The Good Old Days--They Were Terrible!.

In Southern Nevada, there is only a screen door between you and hell. --- an early settler

The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79.
DOUGLAS ADAMS,(1952-) {Mostly Harmless}

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. --John Adams

America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well- wisher to freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.-- John Quincy Adams

Thus the metric system did not really catch on in the States, unless you count the increasing popularity of the nine-millimeter bullet. - Dave Barry

O beautiful for pilgrim feet
Whose stern impassion'd stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness.
America! America!
God mend thine ev'ry flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self control,
Thy liberty in law!
Katharine Lee Bates, "America, the Beautiful"
I do not know how a man can be an American, even if he is not a Christian, and not catch something with regard to God's purpose as to this great land.
Phillips Brooks, _National Needs and Remedies_, 1890

A tramp in Britain is a bum in America, while a bum in Britain is a fanny in America, while a fanny in Britain....well, we've covered that. ~ Bryson Mother Tongue

The religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement on the principles of resistance: it is the dissidence of dissent, and the protestantism of the Protestant religion. --Edmund Burke. 1729-1797.Speech on the Conciliation of America. P. 123.

The United States was Scotland realized beyond the seas. - Andrew Carnegie

The Americans are a funny lot; they drink whiskey to keep them warm; then they put some ice in it to keep it cool; they put some sugar in it to make it sweet; and then they put a slice of lemon in it to make it sour. Then they say "here's to you" and drink it themselves.-- B. N. Chakravaty

The Yankee is a dab at electricity and crime,
He tells you how he hustles and it takes him quite a time.
I like his hospitality that's cordial and frank,
I do not mind his money, but I do not like his swank.
~G.K. Chesterton, 'A Song of Self-Esteem' Collected Poems (1933)

The foundations of our society and our government rest so much on the teachings of the Bible that it would be difficult to support them if faith in these teachings would cease to be practically universal in our country. --Calvin Coolidge, quoted by Cal Thomas, "Silent Cal Speaks: Why Calvin Coolidge is the Model for Conservative Leadership Today" http://www.heritage.org/Research/PoliticalPhilosophy/HL576.cfm

I'd move to Los Angeles if Australia and New Zealand were swallowed by a huge tidal wave, if there was a bubonic plague in England, and if the continent of Africa disappeared from some Martian attack. RUSSEL CROWE, {Interview in Movieline Magazine}

Their demeanour is invariably morose, sullen, clownish and repulsive. I should think there is not, on the face of the earth, a people so entirely destitute of humor, vivacity, or the capacity for enjoyment. -- Charles Dickens (about Americans)

I desperately want my children, and one day (God willing) my grandchildren and their descendants, to have the option of living peacefully and productively in the United States of America. I am certain this depends upon America regaining its Christian - oriented moral compass. - Rabbi Daniel Lapin, America's Real War

...the choice is between a benign Christian culture and a sinister secular one. - Rabbi Daniel Lapin, America's Real War p.14

On July 4, 1776, King George III wrote in his diary, "Nothing of importance today." --Leonard W. Levy, first line of Introduction, _The Framing and Ratification of the Constitution_, co-editor Dennis J. Mahoney, 1987

Why ... do the myths of America the Hateful take such powerful hold? Because anti-Americanism provides a useful emotional function which goes beyond logic and reaches deep into the darker recesses of the European soul. In centuries past those on the Left who wished to personalise their hatred of capitalism, who sought to make it emotionally resonant by fastening an envious political passion on to a blameless scapegoat people, embraced anti-Semitism. It was the socialism of fools. Which is what anti-Americanism is now. - -- Michael Gove, "The hatred of America is the socialism of fools"

Unless the present progress of change be arrested by an increase of taste and judgement in the more educated classes, there can be no doubt that, in another century, the dialect of the Americans will become utterly unintelligible to an Englishman. - Thomas Hamilton (a Scot ) in Men and Manners in America, 1833

Religion stands on tiptoe in our land,
Ready to pass to the American strand.
The Church Militant.George Herbert. 1593-1632.

Nor were they (the Scots) intimidated by their new environment. On the contrary, it had a certain familiar feel: an Anglo-Saxon privileged elite who dominated politics and government; an Anglicized urban middle class divided into competing protestant sects; Irish immigrant workers crowded into growing industrial cities; an inaccessible interior governed by tribal warrior societies about to be displaced by the forces of progress - here was Scotland all over again. - - Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World, 2001, p 328

Nowhere at present is there such a measureless loathing of their country by educated people as in America. --.Eric Hoffer, First Things, Last Things, p. 71.

God forbid we should ever be twenty years without a rebellion. - Thomas Jefferson

In the 1770's surveying the immensity and diversity of London, Dr. Samuel Johnson laid down: "Sir, a man who is tired of London is tired of life." The saying could be rephrased today. A man who hatesAmerica hates humanity.- Paul Johnson

I am willing to love all mankind, except an American.-- Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson 15 April 1778

When it comes to finding available men in Minnesota, the odds are good, but the goods are odd. Garrison Keillor

Welcome to Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking and all the children are above- average. - Garrison Keillor

Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to smart Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams. Mary Ellen Kelly

It was afterwards by the them confessed, that upon the arrival of the English in these parts, the Indians employed their sorcerers, whom they call powaws, like Balaam, to curse them, and let loose their demons upon them, to shipwreck them, to distract them, to poison them, or in any way to ruin them. All the noted powaws in the country spent three days together in diabolical conjurations, to obtain the assistance of the devils against the settlement of these our English; but the devils at length acknowledged unto them, that they could not hinder those people from their becoming the owners and masters of the country; whereupon the Indians resolved upon a good correspondence with our new-comers.- Cotton Mather (Magnalia, v.1 p.55).

If the general attitude of Canadians toward their mighty neighbor to the south could be distilled into a single phrase, that phrase would probably be "Oh, shut up." The Americans talked too much, mainly about themselves. Their torrid love affair with their own history and legend exceeded--painfully--the quasi-British Canadian idea of modesty and self-restraint. ... They were forever busting their buttons in spasms of insufferable yahoo pride or all too publicly agonizing over their crises.
Bruce McCall, _Thin Ice: Coming of Age in Canada_, 1997

Nothing is wrong with California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure.-- RUSS MacDONALD

The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth. attrib. to H. L. Mencken

The United States is the greatest single achievement of European civilization. --Robert B. Mowat (1883-1941)

It's time to say that America is a better place to be a Jew than Jerusalem. If there ever was a promised land, we Jewish Americans are living in it. Rabbi Jacob Neusner, 1987

North American is tilted in such a way that everything loose slides to Southern California. --Donna Newton

We talk about the American Dream, and want to tell the world about the American Dream, but what is that Dream, in most cases, but the dream of material things? I sometimes think that the United States for this reason is the greatest failure the world has ever seen.--Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953)

Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian.-- ROBERT ORBEN, (1927-)

Each American embassy comes with two permanent features--a giant anti-American demonstration and a giant line for American visas. Most demonstrators spend half their time burning Old Glory and the other half waiting for green cards. P. J. O'Rourke

Television has changed the American child from an irresistible force to an immovable object. Laurence J. Peter

Watching all the assorted stuff going on in the US in recent months from a distance an Aussy cyberfriend commented that he was glad they got the convicts and we got the puritans. Robert Pindell (USA)

Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation's troubles and use as a justification of its own demand for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen. --Ayn Rand,_America's Persecuted Minority_

The Constitution does not set up agnosticism as the established non-religion of the United States. --Daniel P. B. Smith, alt .quotations, 22 Feb 2000

Most Americans aren't the sort of citizens the Founding Fathers expected; they are contented serfs. Far from being active critics of government, they assume that its might makes it right. -- Joseph Sobra

I'd rather the United States be the world's policeman than the Soviet Union be the world's jailer.-- Aleksander Solzhenitsyn

American prosperity and American free enterprise are both highly unusual in the world, and we should not overlook the possibility that the two are connected. - Thomas Sowell

One of the peculiarities of the American Revolution was that its leaders pinned their hopes on the organization of decision-making units, the structuring of their incentives, and the counterbalancing of the units against one another, rather than on the more usual (and more exciting) principle of substituting "the good guys" for "the bad guys." -- Thomas Sowell

The reason we fear to go out after dark is not that we may be set upon by bands of evangelicals and forced to read the New Testament, but that we may be set upon by gangs of feral young people who have been taught that nothing is superior to their own needs of feelings. - David C. Stolinsky, "American : A Christian Country," New Oxford Review Jul-Aug 1994

America, my friends, is the only country in the world actually founded on liberty-- the only one. People went to America to be free. -- Margaret Thatcher

I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her comodious harbors and her ample rivers, and it was not there; in her fertile fields and boundless prairies; and it was not there; in her rich mines and her vast commerce, and it was not there. Not until I visited the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.
Alexis de Tocqueville

Of the twenty-two civilisations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now. Arnold Toynbee

I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her comodious harbors and her ample rivers, and it was not there; in her fertile fields and boundless prairies; and it was not there; in her rich mines and her vast commerce, and it was not there. Not until I visited the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.
Often attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville, but not found in his works, see http://faculty.mckenna.edu/jpitney/tocqfraud.html

America is a land where a citizen will cross the ocean to fight for democracy -- and won't cross the street to vote in a national election. Bill Vaughan

[I]f we and our posterity reject religious instruction and authority, violate the rules of eternal justice, trifle with the injunctions of morality, and recklessly destroy the political constitution which holds us together, no man can tell how sudden a catastrophe may overwhelm us, that shall bury all our glory in profound obscurity. --Daniel Webster

I desired as many as could to join together in fasting and prayer, that God would restore the spirit of love and of a sound mind to the poor deluded rebels in America. -- John Wesley, Journal, Aug 1, 1777

Indeed, in many respects, she was quite English, and was an excellent example of the fact that we have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language. -- Oscar Wilde, THE CANTERVILLE GHOST, I.

We planted last spring some 20 acres of Indian corn and sowed some 6 acres of barley and peas, and according to the manner of the Indians, we manured our ground with herrings or rather shads, which we have in great abundance and take with great ease at our doorsteps. We began to gather in the small harvest we had, and to fit up our houses and dwellings against winter, being all well recovered in health and strength and had all things in good plenty. Others were exercised in fishing, about cod and bass and other fish, of which they took good store, of which every family had their portion. All summer there was no lack. And now began to come in store of fowl as winter approached. And besides waterfowl there was great store of wild turkeys, of which we took many, besides deer and other animals. Our harvest being gotten in, Governor Bradford sent four men on fowling and they in one day killed enough fowl to serve our company for a week. During this time, among other recreations, we exercised with our weapons, many of the Indians also coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king, Massasoit, with some 90 men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted; and they went out themselves and killed five deer, which they brought back to our settlement. Edward Winslow & William Bradford , from "Mourt's Relation " and "Of Plymouth Plantation").

Football is a mistake. It combines the two worst elements of American life. Violence and committee meetings. -- George Will

The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children. -- The Duke of Windsor, Look, March 5, 1957