American Mary Quotes & Sayings

Traditionally in American society, men have been trained for both competition and teamwork through sports, while women have been reared to merge their welfare with that of the family, with fewer opportunities for either independence or other team identifications, and fewer challenges to direct competition. In effect, women have been circumscribed within that unit where the benefit of one is most easily believed to be the benefit of all. — Mary Catherine Bateson

Spread the gift. Teach someone to play Mah Jongg! — Mary Anne Puleio

He had offered some of his own background. A youth in the South. An education in the North. Bred for life in the East. Trying not to die in the West. — Mary Doria Russell

Is there room in that Mah Jongg game for me too?! — Mary Anne Puleio

Mary Kay was the wholesome personification of the American dream. For women everywhere, she brought the impossible dream to life by making it a reality. She was a very wise lady. She was a people person. She was very sensitive to the importance of recognizing people. — Zig Ziglar

I think the prom is very serious also. It's an American ritual, it's a rite of passage, and it's very much a part of this country. — Mary Ellen Mark

Even American women are not felt to be persons in the same sense as the male immigrants among the Hungarians, Poles, Russian Jews,
not to speak of Italians, Germans, and the masters of all of us
the Irish! — Mary Corinna Putnam Jacobi

I explain to you, exactly and truly, how we are circumstanced. A greater portion of our means is unavailable, consisting of a house in S. Springfield and some wild lands in Iowa. Notwithstanding my great and good husband's life was sacrificed for his country, we are left to struggle in a manner ... of life undeserved. Roving Generals have elegant mansions showered upon them, and the American people leave the family of the Martyred President to struggle as best they may! Strange justice this. — Mary Todd Lincoln

The American religion-so far as there is one anymore-seems to be doubt. Whoever believes the least wins, because he'll never be found wrong. — Mary Karr

The V-2's directional system was notoriously erratic. In May 1947, a V-2 launched from White Sands Proving Ground headed south instead of north, missing downtown Juarez, Mexico, by 3 miles. The Mexican government's response to the American bombing was admirably laid back. General Enrique Diaz Gonzales and Consul General Raul Michel met with United States officials, who issued apologies and an invitation to come to "the next rocket shoot" at White Sands. The Mexican citizenry was similarly nonchalant. "Bomb Blast Fails to Halt Spring Fiesta," said the El Paso Times headline, noting that "many thought the explosion was a cannon fired for the opening of the fiesta. — Mary Roach

It's a beautiful religion and I wish I understood it more. No, I don't want to understand it all. It's beautiful because it's always a mystery. Sometimes I say I don't believe in God and Jesus and Mary. I'm a bad Catholic because I miss mass once in a while and I grumble when, at confession, I get a heavy penance for something I couldn't help doing. But good or bad, I am a Catholic and I'll never be anything else.
Of course, I didn't ask to be born Catholic, no more than I asked to be born American. But I'm glad it turned out that I'm both these things. — Betty Smith

You want to be French, Mary Frances, that's your problem, but instead you're just another American."
I went to the window for that one an saw a marriage disintegrate before my eyes. Poor Mary Frances in her beige beret ...
"Americans," he repeated. "We don't live in in France, we live in Virginia. Vienna, Virginia. Got it?"
I looked at this guy and knew for certain that if we'd met at a party he'd claim to live in Washington, D.C. Ask for a street address, and he'd look away, mumbling, "Well, just outside D.C. — David Sedaris

American author Mark Twain, while viewed as liberal and non-judgmental, did at times demonstrate both these characteristics. While his reasons for detesting the Christian faith are unclear, they seem to have been profound and deep-rooted. Having lambasted the founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, in a later quote he referred to the Book of Mormon as "chloroform in print." — Christopher Hitchens

In the 1800s, the United States was divided over the issue of slavery. The North wanted the country to end all slavery. But the South wanted to keep slaves because more than four million African-American slaves worked in the huge plantation fields there. This disagreement between the North and South led to the Civil War. Jack — Mary Pope Osborne

Nixon sent some no-account underling to tell us that he had done more for the American Indian than any predecessor and that he saw no reason for our coming to Washington, that he had more important things to do than to talk with us - presumably surreptitiously taping his visitors and planning Watergate. We wondered what all these good things were that he had done for us. — Mary Crow Dog

Education is the great American adventure, the world's most colossal democratic experiment. — Mary McLeod Bethune

In America, they never make anything without first having a market survey to ask the public what they want. People only ask for things they already know about, so you don't get anything new that way. That's why American fashion is stuck. — Mary Quant

When our boulevards are lined with an infinity of bad eating houses filled with dead-faced people placed like mute beasts in their stalls; today, when one out of every three marriages ends in divorce ... It seems incredible that normal human beings not only tolerate the average American restaurant food, but actually prefer it to eating at home. The only possible explanation for such deliberate mass-poisoning, a kind of suicide of the spirit as well as the body, is that meals in the intimacy of a family dining-room or kitchen are unbearable. — Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher

'Reach for a (cigarette) instead of a sweet' - ... advertising slogan..(of) Albert Lasker, (with) Mary Lasker, health philanthropist, and originator of the Lasker Awards, an American version of the Nobel Prize ... and Memorial Sloan Kettering trustees. — Ralph W. Moss

From politics and business to music and food to culture, African-Americans have helped to shape our state's colourful past and its future. — Mary Landrieu

In our hurry of utilitarian progress, we have either forgotten the Indian altogether, or looked upon him only in a business point of view, as we do almost everything else; as a thriftless, treacherous, drunken fellow, who knows just enough to be troublesome, and who must be cajoled or forced into leaving his hunting-grounds for the occupation of very orderly and virtuous white people, who sell him gunpowder and whiskey, but send him now and then a missionary to teach him that it is wrong to get drunk and murder his neighbor. — Mary H. Eastman

The drums of Africa still beat in my heart. They will not let me rest while there is a single Negro boy or girl without a chance to prove his worth. — Mary McLeod Bethune

Benjamin Franklin, who was already in his eighties when he befriended Webster, and who advocated spelling reform, had encouraged the younger man to adopt his ideas. Franklin proposed that we lose c, w, y, and j; modify a and u to represent their different sounds; and adopt a new form of s for sh and a variation on y for ng as well as tweak the h of th to distinguish the sounds of "thy" and "thigh," "swath" and "swathe." If Franklin had had his way, he would have been the Saint Cyril of America - Cyril "perfected" the Greek alphabet for the Russian language; hence the Cyrillic alphabet - and American English would look like Turkish. — Mary Norris

Life for the European is a career; for the American it is a hazard. — Mary McCarthy

The strike of the miners in Arizona was one of the most remarkable strikes in the history of the American labor movement. Its peaceful character, its successful outcome, were due to that most remarkable character, Governor Hunt. — Mary Harris Jones

From being a little girl in the projects, going through all of the mess that I was going through, to ending up at the Inauguration for the first African-American president, I'm speechless right now because I never thought I'd - I never ever - I couldn't even see that far. Even when I ended up in the music business, I couldn't see that. — Mary J. Blige

Now I know what you're saying. You're saying: 'Dave, you have painted a distorted and inaccurate picture of the American health-care system. Not all patients wind up being as wretched as Mary! Many of them wind up being dead'. — Dave Barry

The strongest argument for the un-materialistic character of American life is that we tolerate conditions that are, from a materialistic point of view, intolerable. — Mary McCarthy

Wonderful songwriting, beautiful production, and deeply rooted in what makes American Roots Music great: Deep Southern Pain. It's the hurt that brings the songs, and it's the songs that heal the hurt. Jonathan's songs bring us there, and back. Check this record out, it's a good 'un. — Mary Gauthier

When an American heiress wants to buy a man, she at once crosses the Atlantic. The only really materialistic people I have ever met have been Europeans. — Mary McCarthy

The American Naming Authority, a collective of women studying the effects of names on behavior, decrees that a name should only have one user. The nearly 1 million American users of the name Mary, for example, do not constitute a unified army who might slaughter all users of the name Nancy, as was earlier supposed, but rather a saturation of the Mary Potential Quotient. Simply stated: Too many women with the same name produces widespread mediocrity and fatigue. — Ben Marcus

I think the women - Lauryn Hill, Mary J. Blige, Erykah Badu - are doing new conceptual things and using their voices to create new American music. — Boz Scaggs

The utmost the American novelist can hope for, if he hopes at all to see his work included in the literature of his time, is that it may eventually be found to be along in the direction of the growing tip of collective consciousness. Preeminently the novelist's gift is that of access to the collective mind. — Mary Hunter Austin

You might be addicted to Mah Jongg if... you're allowed only one carry-on and you choose your Mah Jongg bag! — Mary Anne Puleio

I heard of the discovery of the American hemisphere, and wept with Safie over the hapless fate of its original inhabitants. — Mary Shelley

Her room is full of books by people who have radio hours. It's the gospel according to Joseph Smith, Mary Baker Eddy, and Aimee Semple McPherson - American dynamism gilded onto a platform of individual redemption. It's religion as detergent. — Carlene Bauer

At some future time I shall see New York the artist's ground. I think you will create an American School. — Mary Cassatt

For I am my mother's daughter, and ... — Mary McLeod Bethune

My dad's American, and my mom's French. I lived in France for the first 18 years of my life, then came here to go to school at the College of William and Mary. I studied marketing. I really didn't know what I wanted to do, so I thought that's what I should do - study business - because it would give me the best chance to find work. — Stephanie Szostak

intriguing, not standard Hollywood stuff. He was not a street kid who'd had to claw his way to respectability. His reasonably well-to-do family's roots traced back to George Washington's mother, and he was always proud of the fact that he was distantly related to "one of the founders of our country." Bill was Irish-English-German, "mixed in an American shaker," as he liked to say. His maternal grandfather was a cousin of Warren G. Harding, twenty-ninth president of the United States. Bill had been born William Franklin Beedle Jr. in O'Fallon, Illinois, on April 17, 1918. When he was three, the family moved to Pasadena, California. His father, William, was an industrial chemist; his mother, Mary, a teacher. He had two younger brothers, Robert (Bob) Westfield Beedle, and Richard (Dick Porter) Beedle. — Edward Z. Epstein

One day the English language is going to perish. The easy spokenness of it will perish and go black and crumbly - maybe - and it will become a language like Latin that learned people learn. And scholars will write studies of Larry Sanders and Friends and Will & Grace and Ellen and Designing Women and Mary Tyler Moore, and everyone will see that the sitcom is the great American art form. American poetry will perish with the language; the sitcoms, on the other hand, are new to human evolution and therefore will be less perishable. — Nicholson Baker

There's one beneficial effect of going to Moscow. You come home waving the American flag with all your might. — Mary Tyler Moore

The American character looks always as if it had just had a rather bad haircut, which gives it, in our eyes at any rate, a greater humanity than the European, which even among its beggars has an all too professional air. — Mary McCarthy

The adoring crowds and overwhelming Democratic support in the 2008 election was based largely on joy at jettisoning Bush and the appeal of electing a superbly qualified charismatic African American leader. — Mary Frances Berry

In 1900, the typical American was a boy, not yet a teenager, named John. He lived with his parents and his sisters, Mary and Helen, on a farm in New York or Pennsylvania. — Bill Dedman

To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics. — Mary McCarthy

The largest business in American handled by a woman is the Money Order Department of the Pittsburgh Post-office; Mary Steel has it in charge. — Lydia Hoyt Farmer

Cultural wisdom says 'Don't quit your day job.' Yet I think these desires represent our psyche's stretch toward wholeness. And to be whole, as many religious tranditions teach, is to make manifest a unique face of God in the world. We don't want to be irresponsible, yet for every accountant who deserts his family and sails for Tahiti, ten American men have heart attacks at their desks, after hours. — Mary Rose O'Reilley

It takes Passion to bring a Vision to Life. — Mary Adair

I grew up in a small town in northeastern Indiana. I had an all-American childhood. And I grew up as an optimist. — Mary Meeker

Today, there are no prescribed rules for mourning because it takes place outside the rest of American life, and awkward encounters like the one Mary Wilde had at the florist ' s are a natural result of that. And maybe special classifications like "complicated grief" can have the effect of safely categorizing away people to whom horrific things happen, reassuring everyone else that catastrophe is not part of the regular course of human life. Not here, in twenty-first - century America. — Kate Sweeney

Stop using the word 'Negro.' The word is a misnomer from every point of view. It does not represent a country or anything else ... I am an African-American. — Mary Church Terrell

I want to hold a series of meetings all over the country and get the facts before the American people. — Mary Harris Jones

From Clara Barton's tireless work founding the American Red Cross to the first female Medal of Honor winner, Dr. Mary Walker, to our first female combat fighter pilot Lt. Kara Hultgreen, no list of American heroes is complete without the names of some of these extraordinary women. — Brian Kilmeade

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

Without that assured American largesse Israel would have been obliged to come to an accommodation with her neighbours. — Mary Douglas

The trade agreement has become a rather distinct feature of the American labor movement ... It is based on the idea that labor shall accept the capitalist system of production and make terms of peace with it. — Mary Ritter Beard

In verity we are the poor. This humanity we would claim for ourselves is the legacy, not only of the Enlightenment, but of the thousands and thousands of European peasants and poor townspeople who came here bringing their humanity and their sufferings with them. It is the absence of a stable upper class that is responsible for much of the vulgarity of the American scene. Should we blush before the visitor for this deficiency? — Mary McCarthy

Suddenly, four or five soldiers with round helmets and guns in hand enter the courtyard. One of them, presumably the commander, knocks hard on the door while shouting, with a strong Yankee accent: 'We are American soldiers ... Are there any Germans here?' His manner is so imperious and sure, you would think he had already won the war. We greet them with open arms. Their confidence is so contagious that we consider the Liberation to be already accomplished. As if the entire German army were obliterated in only one night. — Mary Louise Roberts

When I was five, we moved to Virginia and lived inside an old fort that was surrounded by a moat. So when I heard stories of American history, I felt as if those dramas were taking place right in my own backyard. — Mary Pope Osborne

The history of my state of Oklahoma offers a great example of pursuing the American Dream. It was built and settled by pioneers moving West to seek better lives. — Mary Fallin

Betty White's Sue Ann Nivens was classic ... She had done so much with that man-crazy character! Betty made every moment count. She still does. I've declared her an American treasure, because she is just that. — Gavin MacLeod

My weakness is 'American Idol.' My husband thinks it's ridiculous. But I am so inspired by those young people who are singing their guts out. — Mary Gordon

If a friend of mine in Paris had confessed that he was in love with a Simon or a Peter, I would have compared notes with him on my love for Mary Ann. Gender in matters of love struck me as of no greater consequence than flavours in ice-cream. I imagine the absence of religion in my upbringing was one factor that had allowed this belief to survive. Perhaps, too, I had a natural openness in the matter. At any rate, it was completely unwittingly that I had disregarded this fundamental polarity of North American society. — Yann Martel

It was in the library that he and May had always discussed the future of the children: the studies of Dallas and his young brother Bill, Mary's incurable indifference to "accomplishments," and passion for sport and philanthropy, and the vague leanings toward "art" which had finally landed the restless and curious Dallas in the office of a rising New York architect.
The young men nowadays were emancipating themselves from the law and business and taking up all sorts of new things. If they were not absorbed in state politics or municipal reform, the chances were that they were going in for Central American archaeology, for architecture or landscape-engineering; taking a keen and learned interest in the prerevolutionary buildings of their own country, studying and adapting Georgian types, and protesting at the meaningless use of the word "Colonial." Nobody nowadays had "Colonial" houses except the millionaire grocers of the suburbs. — Edith Wharton

The new fashions sold in department
stores had thrown skilled American seamstresses out of work, you see.
They'd been displaced by immigrant girls doing piecework for a pittance
in terrible sweatshops. I refused to patronize a garment industry
that exploited its desperately poor workers so heartlessly.
And if that wasn't enough to keep me out of stores, there was this as
well: I was determined to resist that shameless sister of war propaganda
the advertising industry. — Mary Doria Russell

Historic American Buildings Survey - HABS for short - was one of FDR's greatest New Deal investments. Jobless folk fanned out across the country, seeking old buildings, photographing them and sketching their floor plans. Many of the structures they recorded in the 1930s were caught in the act of falling down. Some of them were documented in no other place. — Mary Anna Evans

The land is sacred. These words are at the core of your being. The land is our mother, the rivers our blood. Take our land away and we die. That is, the Indian in us dies. — Mary Brave Bird

The paradox of American democracy has been that its slogan of equal opportunity has meant, often, equal opportunity to get power over your fellows. — Mary Parker Follett

What is a good enough principle for an American citizen ought to be good enough for the working man to follow. — Mary Harris Jones

Mostly I'm just not American. I spent four years of my childhood here, but I think if you're Canadian you have a very different perspective. You don't think you're at the center of things. — Mary Harron

It turned out to be impossible for me to 'run away' in the sense other American teenagers did. Any movement at all was taken for progress in my family. — Mary Karr

The South has not always been the friendliest place for African-Americans. — Mary Landrieu