America That Island Quotes & Sayings

Never before has anyone figured out how to rent out American foreign policy, how to convert the position of secretary of state into a personal money machine. Hillary, with Bill's help, figured out not only how to shake down Russian oligarchs and Canadian billionaires by offering them control of America's uranium assets; she also figured out how to rob the island nation of Haiti in the wake of the 2010 earthquake. It's one thing to rip off the world's rich; it takes a special kind of chutzpah to steal from the poorest of the poor. — Dinesh D'Souza

I knew I couldn't live in America and I wasn't ready to move to Europe so I moved to an island off the coast of America - New York City . — Spalding Gray

I go down to Newport and Huntington a lot. It's more crowded than where I grew up on Phillip Island, but I think it's helped me adjust to life in America - getting into the water as much as I can. — Liam Hemsworth

Some of these Marines learned what they know on Guadalcanal, a basically useless island in the Southwest Pacific where the Empire of Nippon and the United States of America are disputing - with rifles - each other's right to build a military airbase. Early returns suggest that the Nipponese Army, during its extended tour of East Asia, has lost its edge. It would appear that raping the entire female population of Nanjing, and bayoneting helpless Filipino villagers, does not translate into actual military competence. The Nipponese Army is still trying to work out some way to kill, say, a hundred American Marines without losing, say, five hundred of its own soldiers. — Neal Stephenson

It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York - and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. — F Scott Fitzgerald

I live in a house over there on the Island, and in that house there is a man waiting for me. When he drove up at the door I drove out of the dock because he says I'm his ideal. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Soon you catch your first glimpse of a vineyard basking in the sun, its broad leaves silently turning sunlight into sugar, ripening vitis vinifera, the European grapes that make the world's finest wines. For a moment you might imagine you've been mysteriously wafted to the French countryside, but no, this is the East End of Long Island, the most exciting new wine region in North America. You've reached your destination, but your journey of discovery has barely begun — Jane Taylor Starwood

Leif Ericson discovered Baffin Island, Labrador and Newfoundland, some 500 years before Columbus discovered America. Ericson sailed south along the Eastern Coast of America as far as Maine and perhaps beyond." Captain Hank Bracker — Hank Bracker

As Beaumarchais gathered blankets and grenades in France, William Howe's redcoats came ashore and slaughtered Washington's forces on Long Island, in Brooklyn, and then in Manhattan. A humiliated Washington could do nothing to stop his troops' shoddy retreat from Kips Bay, swatting at them with his horsewhip and howling, Are these the men with which I am to defend America? — Sarah Vowell

On Chicken Parmesan: It was all downhill from there. Eventually, the boneless chicken breast replaced the chicken breast as America's favorite tasteless meat product, and then boneless skinless chicken breast, and somewhere in between the birth of my ultimate nemesis: The Chicken Patty. How things went quite so far downhill that the patty found its way into ANY Italian food is beyond me, but I can assure you this dish isn't what anyone back in Italy had in mind when they sent Vito through Ellis Island with an eggplant recipe. — Gordon Vivace

Whether our ancestors came here on the Mayflower, on slave ships, whether they came to Ellis Island or LAX in Los Angeles, whether they came yesterday or walked this land a thousand years ago our great challenge for the 21st century is to find a way to be One America. We can meet all the other challenges if we can go forward as One America. — William J. Clinton

I live in a 'sky island,' a unique mountain valley environment where half the animal species of North America can be found. — Nancy Farmer

In other fields of endeavor poverty has been the spur to action. Napoleon was born in obscurity, the son of a hand-to-mouth scrivener in the backward island of Corsica. Abraham Lincoln, the boast and pride of America, the man who made this land too hot for the feet of slaves, came from a log cabin in the Ohio backwoods. So did James A. Garfield. Ulysses Grant came from a tanyard to become the world's greatest general. Thomas A. Edison commenced as a newsboy on a railway train. — Joseph Devlin

As a New Yorker, I'm someone who lives on an island and looks across to America. — Laurie Anderson

The military alone cannot end the conflict in Afghanistan. On that much nearly everyone can agree, offering a rare island of consensus among sides otherwise divided on the question of how and when America's longest-ever war should wind down. — Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

If Columbus in an island of America had not caught the disease, which poisons the source of generation, and often indeed prevents generation, we should not have chocolate and cochineal — Voltaire

I know that most domesticated animals aren't indigenous to this country. So guess what, cat? You can beat it. Go back to Catalina Island or Catalonia, Spain, or Katmandu, or wherever the hell your hairy ass is from! 'Cause this is America and around here - Katmandon't. — Arj Barker

Columbus's real achievement was managing to cross the ocean successfully in both directions. Though an accomplished enough mariner, he was not terribly good at a great deal else, especially geography, the skill that would seem most vital in an explorer. It would be hard to name any figure in history who has achieved more lasting fame with less competence. He spent large parts of eight years bouncing around Caribbean islands and coastal South America convinced that he was in the heart of the Orient and that Japan and China were at the edge of every sunset. He never worked out that Cuba is an island and never once set foot on, or even suspected the existence of, the landmass to the north that everyone thinks he discovered: the United States. — Bill Bryson

You are all misleading one another, and are yourselves deceived. The sun does not go round the
earth, but the earth goes round the sun, revolving as it
goes, and turning towards the sun in the course of each
twenty-four hours, not only Japan, and the Philippines,
and Sumatra where we now are, but Africa, and Europe,
and America, and many lands besides. The sun does not
shine for some one mountain, or for some one island,
or for some one sea, nor even for one earth alone, but
for other planets as well as our earth. If you would
only look up at the heavens, instead of at the ground
beneath your own feet, you might all understand this,
and would then no longer suppose that the sun shines
for you, or for your country alone. — Leo Tolstoy

You, the Spirit of the Settlement! ... Not understand that America is God's crucible, the great melting-pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming! Here, you stand, good folk, think I, when I see them at Ellis Island, here you stand in your fifty groups, with your fifty languages and histories, and your fifty blood hatreds and rivalries ... — Israel Zangwill

What we have seen of recent American action in the Pacific, the bombing of Tokyo and the engagements in the Coral Sea, off Midway Island and at Dutch Harbour, has been sufficient indication that America is beginning to discharge her supremely important duty in the Pacific. — Chiang Kai-shek

Yes, movies! Look at them - All of those glamorous people - having adventures - hogging it all, gobbling the whole thing up! You know what happens? People go to the movies instead of moving! Hollywood characters are supposed to have all the adventures for everybody in America, while everybody in America sits in a dark room and watches them have them! Yes, until there's a war. That's when adventure becomes available to the masses! Everyone's dish, not only Gable's! Then the people in the dark room come out of the dark room to have some adventures themselves - Goody, goody! - It's our turn now, to go to the south Sea Island - to make a safari - to be exotic, far-off! - But I'm not patient. I don't want to wait till then. I'm tired of the movies and I am about to move! — Tennessee Williams

When they got here, when they successfully emigrated - and not everybody that came through Ellis Island was accepted. If you were sick you were not allowed in. If you had any kind of a disease, we were in the process of trying to wipe out all these diseases. We did that by keeping people who had them out of the country. You might look at it today as, "Wow, that was really mean." No. It was putting America first. It was putting the American people first, and it was a realization that we can't take everybody. — Rush Limbaugh

When people are kids their parents teach them all sorts of stuff, some of it true and useful, some of it absurd hogwash (example of former: don't crap your pants; example of latter: Columbus discovered America). This is why puberty happens. The purpose of puberty is to shoot an innocent and gullible child full of nasty glandular secretions that manifest in the mind as confusion, in the innards as horniness, upon the skin as pimples, and on the tongue as cocksure venomous disbelief in every piece of information, true or false, gleaned from one's parents since infancy. The net result is a few years of familial hell culminating in the child's exodus from the parental nest, sooner or later followed by a peace treaty and the emergence of the postpubescent as an autonomous, free-thinking human being who knows that Columbus only trespassed on an island inhabited by our lost and distant Indian relatives, but who also knows not to crap his pants. — David James Duncan

South America had been an island continent, far bigger and far more diverse than Australia, for tens of millions of years before the Isthmus of Panama rose just a couple of million years ago. The resulting flood of North American mammals across the new land bridge corresponds in time with the decimation of the native South American fauna. In fact, most large mammals generally considered distinctly South American ... are all recent migrants from North America. — Stephen Jay Gould

A year earlier my parents had moved us out of the city to a split-level on Long Island, their idea of the American dream, which meant it as now an hour-and-a-half commute via the 7:06 Hicksville to Penn Station every morning. (Dark City Lights) — Jonathan Santlofer

As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said "No Trespassing."
But on the other side it didn't say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.
This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York island
From the Redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me. — Woody Guthrie

Prime-time network television has become an island without religion in an ever-more-religious America. — Ben Stein

Franklin's inquisitive mind craved stimulation, consistently gravitating toward whatever community of intellects asked the most intriguing questions; his expansive temperament sought souls that resonated with his own generosity and sense of virtue. In five years in England he had found more of both than in a lifetime in America. "Of all the enviable things England has," he told Polly Stevenson, "I envy most its people. Why should that petty island, which compared to America is but like a stepping stone in a brook, scarce enough of it above water to keep one's shoes dry; why, I say, should that little island enjoy in almost every neighbourhood more sensible, virtuous and elegant minds than we can collect in ranging 100 leagues of our vast forests?" He left such people reluctantly and, he trusted, temporarily. — H.W. Brands

I engage with New York and America but my parents pretty much hang out in this radius of Long Island where their friends are and where their work is. That's why you have people who have lived in New York for like 20, 30 years who don't speak English. They just live in a Chinese community or an Indian community. More than anywhere you'll find that in Queens. — Himanshu Suri

Sometime during the many millions of years that have elapsed since mammalian faunas came into existence, some sort of island crossed from West Africa to South America. — Louis Leakey

I'm stuck somewhere a small island in the middle of the Atlantic where I'm alone. Because in France, they're like, 'No, you're not like us, you're not a French guy.' And in America, they're like, 'You're not like us.' I'm really alone in my little thing. — Louis Leterrier

More and more too, the old name absorbs into me. Mannahatta, 'the place encircled by many swift tides and sparkling waters.' How fit a name for America's great democratic island city! The word itself, how beautiful! how aboriginal! how it seems to rise with tall spires, glistening in sunshine, with such New World atmosphere, vista and action! — Walt Whitman

Traveling in Europe made me understand that America has an island mentality: No one exists except us. There's a whole other world out there, but most Americans - all they know is America, the marketing plan. — Will.i.am

El Paso in many ways is the Ellis Island for Mexico and much of Latin America. — Beto O'Rourke

Both of my parents were born into poor families on the island of Cuba. They came to America because it was the only place where people like them could have a chance. — Marco Rubio

I thought that exile meant you had to leave your country and you could go anywhere--somewhere in the sun, a tropical island, say, or America. But exile doesn't mean that; it means you are banished to a specific place, and guess what, that place isn't in the sun and is no paradise, it's not even America. It's some cold, miserable place like Siberia, where you don't know anyone and you can barely survive. It's another prison. — Sally Green

A typical battlefield of this struggle is Hawaii, America's most deceptively beautiful state. For most residents and visitors, it seems an unspoiled island paradise. In actuality it is a killing field of biological diversity. When — Edward O. Wilson

Why leave a country when you're on top? Whether it was another communist scare or the even greener pastures in America, no one ever gives me a straight answer. (The only thing anyone can agree on is that they still miss the island.) — Eddie Huang

These Reformation wars involved the biggest population movements in Europe between the 'barbarian' upheavals which dismantled the western Roman Empire and the twentieth century's First and Second World Wars. Hundreds of thousands of people decided to follow the example of the English, quit Europe and brave the terrors of the Atlantic to find a new life in north America. As early as 1662 some of the Duke of Savoy's Waldensian victims in the Alpine valleys took ship for a sympathetic Dutch Reformed colony; they found a new safe home on Stateri Island, amid the great natural haven which would become New York.3 — Diarmaid MacCulloch

If people think we can draw a circle around North America and that we can be an independent island of energy, that's not realistic. This is a world market for oil, for refined products, and increasingly, for natural gas. — Richard Kinder

In the springtime, we have softshell crab from Maryland, which I'd never had until I came to America. In the summer and early fall, we have striped bass, 'stripeys,' which come all the way up the Hudson River but mostly gather in the sound at the tip of Long Island, off Montauk. — Daniel Boulud

As ever, the original inhabitants of Turtle Island are entirely overlooked. Mysteriously, the only time indigenous people are guaranteed a mainstream Amerikkan mention is on Thanksgiving.
Again, to contextualize, this would be be kinda like someone busting into your house and robbing you blind, then sending you postcards once a year to remind you how much they are enjoying all of your stuff, and getting annoyed with you if you don't respond with appreciation for their thoughtfulness. — Inga Muscio

There are big surfing communities in every country with an ocean coast that I know in Central and South America. Same with Mexico, Bali, and nearly every island nation that gets waves in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. But that's a relatively recent development in most places. — William Finnegan