American Success Quotes & Sayings

Reggie Campbell and Kathleen Goldsmith are participants in an American success story, the unprecedented boom of home-buying by African-Americans in the 1990s. Only he is black and she is white. When he moved into the neighborhood, she moved out. — Bill Dedman

It is an irony of history that the first and greatest success of scientists in persuading governments of the indispensability of modern scientific theory to society was in the war against fascism. It is an even greater and more tragic irony that it was anti-fascist scientists who convinced the American government of the feasibility and necessity of manufacturing nuclear arms, which were then constructed by an international team of largely anti-fascist scientists. — Eric Hobsbawm

Magazines devoted to the religion of success appear as Makers of America. They mean just about that when they preach evolution, progress, prosperity, being constructive, the American way of doing things. It is easy to laugh, but, in fact, they are using a very great pattern of human endeavor. For one thing it adopts an impersonal criterion; for another it adopts an earthly criterion; for a third it is habituating men to think quantitatively. To be sure the idea confuses excellence with size, happiness with speed, and human nature with contraption. Yet the same motives are at work which have ever actuated any moral code, or ever will. The desire fir the biggest, the fastest, the highest, or if you are a maker of wristwatches or microscopes the smallest; the love in short of the superlative and the "peerless," is in essence and possibility a noble passion. — Walter Lippmann

A budget should be judged by whether it creates a foundation for the success of American working families striving to buy a house, or to send their kids to college, or to save a little for retirement and, if they're lucky, a vacation. — Jeff Merkley

Getting fired can produce a particularly bountiful payday for a CEO. Indeed, he can 'earn' more in that single day, while cleaning out his desk, than an American worker earns in a lifetime of cleaning toilets. Forget the old maxim about nothing succeeding like success: Today, in the executive suite, the all-too-prevalent rule is that nothing succeeds like failure. — Warren Buffett

An All-American is an ordinary person with an extraordinary desire to excel. You don't get to the top of the mountain by just dreaming. It's nice to dream. But it's the work ethic and pride that makes you get to that mountain top and that level of success. — Dick Vitale

On the whole, the great success of marriage in the States is due partly to the fact that no American man is ever idle, and partly to the fact that no American wife is considered responsible for the quality of her husband's dinners. — Oscar Wilde

With five chances on each hand and one unwavering aim, no boy, however poor, need despair. There is bread and success for every youth under the American flag who has energy and ability to seize his opportunity. — Orison Swett Marden

The traditional American family has always been the foundation for success in America. — Bill O'Reilly

I want to challenge myself to see where my limit is and experiment with a lot of different films. A lot of artists from Asia focus too much on their Asian background. I don't want to let go of my background, but to be a success in the U.S., which is my goal, I realize I need to surround myself with American filmmakers and producers. — Rain

The three great American vices seem to be efficiency, punctuality, and the desire for achievement and success. They are the things that make the Americans so unhappy and so nervous. — Lin Yutang

And this is why I have concluded that although every racial, ethnic, and religious group in the United States claims to want a piece of the American dream, there is no group that apologizes more for its success than black people. — Lawrence Otis Graham

In the 1920s, everyone wanted to be a celebrity. Everyone wanted to be like Babe Ruth or Charles Lindbergh ... Businessmen, in particular, in the '20s really believed that to be a success, an entrepreneur needed to have a personality, a sense that you were a success. That's why I think Capone dressed the way he did. And that's why he entertained the press - because he wanted to be perceived as a successful American. Dale Carnegie ... would later cite Capone as a model for creating the public image. Obviously, it went bad in many ways for Capone, but that's the image he was going for. — Jonathan Eig

Because it is contrary to all the principles upon which the United States of America have won success in the world. It is an exotic importation from lands in which liberty is stifled, brought here by persons who do not understand American institutions, taken up as a fad by a few dreamers. Because men always cease to be Socialists as soon as they have won success in life; suggesting that Socialism is merely a vague expression of the discontent of some, the disappointment of others. — Various

Baseball is the exponent of American Courage, Confidence, Combativeness, American Dash, Discipline, Determination, American Energy, Eagerness, Enthusiasm, American Pluck, Persistency, Performance, American Spirit, Sagacity, Success, American Vim, Vigor, Virility. — Albert Goodwill Spalding

What do you do when you find yourself out in a lie - even a white one? Well, one thing for sure, you don't put on black, you don't mourn and beat out a staccato mea culpa on your breast. You go! Get the hell out! Take a chance! Forget you're an American, living in the suburbs of success, hoping to move into the big city ... You go! — Vincent Price

We are still a country where hard work and perseverance can earn you a better life ... Yet we are rightfully troubled that many of our people are still caught in what seems to be a pervasive, unending financial struggle ... every American deserves an equal opportunity to achieve success. — Marco Rubio

The American mind in particular has been trained to equate success with victory, to equate doing well with beating someone. — Elliot Aronson

First, contrary to popular belief, Buddhists can actually be very anxious people. That's often why they become Buddhists in the first place. Buddhism was made for the anxious like Christianity was made for the downtrodden or AA for the addicted. Its entire purpose is to foster equanimity, to tame excesses of thought and emotion. The Buddhists have a great term for these excesses. They refer to them as the condition of "monkey mind." A person in the throes of monkey mind suffers from a consciousness whose constituent parts will not stop bouncing from skull-side to skull-side, which keep flipping and jumping and flinging feces at the walls and swinging from loose neurons like howlers from vines. Buddhist practices are designed explicitly to collar these monkeys of the mind and bring them down to earth - to pacify them. Is it any wonder that Buddhism has had such tremendous success in the bastions of American nervousness, on the West Coast and in the New York metro area? — Daniel Smith

Because success is such a weasel word anyway, it's such a horribly American word, and it's such a vamp and, I think it's a death trap. — Daniel Berrigan

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

My definition, a definition in the drill books from the time that General Von Steuben wrote the regulations for General George Washington, the definition of the object of military training is success in battle ... It wouldn't be any sense to have a military organization on the backs of the American taxpayers with any other definition. — Chesty Puller

My family achieved success not in spite of, but because of the American system of taxation. After all, without reliable and safe roads there'd have been no Disneyland; without high functioning legal systems and a well regulated business environment there would have been no copyright protection for Mickey Mouse. — Abigail Disney

Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns is an American masterpiece, a stupendous literary success that channels the social sciences as iconic biography in order to tell a vast story of a people's reinvention of itself and of a nation-the first complete history of the Great Black Migration from start to finish, north, east, west. — David Levering Lewis

American parents, teachers, and children were far more likely than their Japanese and Chinese counterparts to believe that mathematical ability is innate; if you have it, you don't have to work hard, and if you don't have it, there's no point in trying. In contrast, most Asians regard math success, like achievement in any other domain, as a matter of persistence and plain hard work. Of course you will make mistakes as you go along; that's how you learn and improve. It doesn't mean you are stupid. — Carol Tavris

The success I have achieved in bodybuilding, motion pictures, and business would not have been possible without the generosity of the American people and the freedom here to pursue your dreams. — Arnold Schwarzenegger

I think in American culture, we put value on economic success but tell people you don't have to be economically successful to be happy. — John Hodgman

Whether you attribute it to some mysterious triple package or to your own Horatio Alger story, to succeed in America is, somehow, to be complicit with the idea of America - which means that at some level you've made peace with its rather ugly past. — Vijay Iyer

We talked about and that has always been a puzzle to me
why American men think that success is everything
when they know that eighty percent of them are not
going to succeed more than to just keep going and why
if they are not why do they not keep on being
interested in the things that interested them when
they were college men and why American men different
from English men do not get more interesting as they
get older. — Gertrude Stein

It is an American weakness. The success becomes the sage. Scientists counsel on civil liberty; comedians and actresses lead political rallies; athletes tell us what brand of cigarette to smoke. — Robert Leckie

Actually, Wilson's art can't fit into these neat categories. My own take is that the best way to think of Wilson is as an outsider musician, but one who actually happens to have a huge amount of talent. Much like, say, Wesley Willis, Wilson is focussed on having huge commercial success, but has little to no idea what actually counts as commercial. He's very easily swayed by people around him, so if he's told he should be doing three-minute pop songs, he does three-minute pop songs, and if he's told he should do epic suites about the American Dream, he does those. But at all times there are two things that remain true about him: he has an unerring ability as an arranger, and a directness that makes his music more communicative than any other music I've ever heard. — Andrew Hickey

The journalist Walter Lippmann identified in Henry Ford, for all his peculiarity, a common strain of "primitive Americanism." The industrialist's conviction that he could make the world conform to his will was founded on a faith that success in economic matters should, by extension, allow capitalists to try their hands "with equal success" at "every other occupation." "Mr. Ford is neither a crank nor a freak," Lippmann insisted, but "merely the logical exponent of American prejudices about wealth and success. — Greg Grandin

Our stories are timeless and tested. They are about us, a people of tremendous strength.Our songs are full of love and life - and the ups and downs of both. They are soulful with the rhythms of a heart that is in sync with nature and wonderment. Our struggles are real and rugged. They beckon our memory to the highest callings of the spirit, to help us rejoice and to overcome. — Deborah L. Parker

Like so many American families, our families weren't asking for much. They didn't begrudge anyone else's success or care that others had much more than they did ... in fact, they admired it. — Michelle Obama

Success is the American Dream. And that success is not something to be ashamed of, or to demonize. — Susana Martinez

The only way to success in American public life lies in flattering and kowtowing to the mob — H.L. Mencken

My childhood, adolescence and high school days are unusually important. If there has ever been a time that I developed a uniqueness and sense of humor and the ability to organize, it was then. In those early days, I developed the skills that gave me a certain degree of success in American politics. — Lee Atwater

It's sort of the American way to go up and down the ladder, maybe several times in a lifetime. — Martha Stewart

I'm a kid who grew up in an all African-American neighborhood and got into schools and aspired to just be me, and didn't worry about labels or anything. Just wanted to be a success at what I did. — Darius Rucker

The American Dream became America's god; wealth and abundance have become the measure of America's success. But - as recent events have shown - we have been living an illusion. — Billy Graham

Let me put it this way: You cannot live in the world without being in pain, spiritual and physical pain. We have developed mechanisms to deal with these pains, to overcome them somehow. Therapy, religion and spirituality, relationships, material success. All this can work, but also become a problem itself.
The pursuit of happiness has even been put into the American constitution a couple centuries ago. Today we're so rich, we own much more than we need, we have liberties unknown before, even though they are endangered in the current political climate in the US - and we forget how wonderful it nevertheless is, compared to most other political and economic systems. We have a saying that goes: Give a man enough rope and he hangs himself. — David Foster Wallace

I should mention that all of the above explorers were unqualified failures. Not coincidentally, they were also all British. Americans admire success. Englishman admire heroic failure. Given a choice
at least in my reading
I'm un-American enough to take quixotry over efficiency any day. — Anne Fadiman

It may be the optimist in me, but I think America has a uniquely powerful and capacious glue internally. The American identity has always been ethnically and religiously neutral, so within one generation you have Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Jamaican-Americans - they feel American. It's a huge success story. — Amy Chua

I believe the American dream is still alive and that education and entrepreneurship together are its key enablers. Through the years I have observed the power of this combination when the two forces work in tandem. Together they lead to personal success, business success, and societal success. — Ralph De La Vega

We are a people that have always celebrated other people's success so long as we always had the opportunity to meet that success ourselves. That is the American nature. That is the American character. That is one of the things that makes us different from the rest of the world. And I'm afraid we could lose that or are on the verge of losing that. — Marco Rubio

When success happens to an English writer, he acquires a new typewriter. When success happens to an American writer, he acquires a new life. — Martin Amis

American society [ ... ] not only sanctions gross and unfair relations among men, but it encourages them. Now, can that be denied? No. Rivalry, competition, envy, jealousy, all that is malignant in human character is nourished by the system. Possession, money, property
on such corrupt standards as these do you people measure happiness and success. — Philip Roth

The American College of Sports Medicine found that the productivity of people after exercise was an average of 65 percent higher than those who did not exercise. If I have something that's really bothering me, so much that it almost hurts my head to try to sort it out, I always find the solution in a puddle of sweat! Intense exercise is like taking a magic pill that gives you the ability to solve problems like a superhero. — Chalene Johnson

In keeping Americans ill-educated, ill-informed and constitutionally ignorant, the education establishment has been the politician's major and most faithful partner. It is in this sense that American education can be deemed a success. — Walter E. Williams

Do right-handed people live longer than lefties?

Then again, there are some things about lefties that can't be explained so easily. For whatever reason, whether it's the pressures of living in a world designed for righties, or all the talk of having shorter life spans, lefties have higher rates of depression, drug abuse, allergies, and schizophrenia. But lefties also have an advantage in sports like fencing, tennis and baseball, not to mention greater academic success and higher IQs. Five of America's last eleven presidents were lefties, even though they make up only 10 percent of the American population." (I believe Obama is a leftie as well, making that 6 of the last 12 presidents). — Anahad O'Connor

I think food trucks are the new answer to American fast food. The idea of raising two or three million dollars and going through red tape to open a restaurant, there's lots of barriers to success. There's a really easy jumping place for food trucks. It's very hip and acceptable for new chefs to open a food truck first. — Tyler Florence

A Disavowal of the pursuit of Middleclassness', the heading read. While it is permissible to chase 'middleincomeness' with all our might, the text stated, those blessed with the talent or good fortune to achieve success in the American mainstream must avoid the psychological entrapment of Black 'middleclassness' that hypnotizes the successful brother or sister into believing they are better than the rest and teaches them to think in terms of 'we' and 'they' instead of 'US'! — Barack Obama

Christian attempts at social witness have often swung wildly back and forth between chest-beating optimism to withdrawal and despair. One minute we are "reclaiming America for Christ," the next we pronounce that American culture is "slouching toward Gomorrah." We lose sight both of the fact that all of human history - from Eden onward - is a war zone, and that God's kingdom triumph is proven not by our electoral success or our cultural influence - as important as that is in being obediently "salt" and "light" in our culture. Our triumph is proven in the resurrection of the world's rightful ruler. — Russell D. Moore

Democrats believe in reigniting the American dream by removing barriers to success and building ladders of opportunity for all, so everyone can succeed. — Nancy Pelosi

I think Hemingway's [book] titles should be awarded first prize in any contest. Each of them is a poem, and their mysterious power over readers contributes to Hemingway's success. His titles have a life of their own, and they have enriched the American vocabulary. — Sylvia Beach

American culture has always known success, not suffering, so we've never known what to do with this part of the Bible. The more we succeed, the more we're seduced into thinking we can control everything. We dissect Revelation to get a sense of control over the future. — Bill Vaughan

You want to be a country that creates food stamps? In which case, frankly, Obama is an enormous success the most successful food stamp president in American history. Or do you want to be a country that creates jobs? — Newt Gingrich

What was I so enthusiastic about? The American Dream - The opportunity for everyone to success, to get somewhere by their own efforts, and like many teenagers, I was also a fan of a certain brand of jeans that couldn't be bought in the GDR, but I had an aunt in the west who used to send them to me. I loved the vast American landscapes, where the air is full of spirit of freedom and independence. In 1990 my husband and I flew to America for the very first time, to California. We will never forget that view of the Pacific Ocean. It was nothing short of magnificent. — Stefan Kornelius

The consumption of food was a sacrament of success. A man who carried a great stomach before him was thought to be in his prime. Women went into hospitals to die of burst bladders, collapsed lungs, overtaxed hearts and meningitis of the spine. There was a heavy traffic to the spas and sulphur springs, where the purgative was valued as an inducement to the appetite. America was a great farting country. All this began to change when Taft moved into the White House. His accession to the one mythic office in the American imagination weighed everyone down. His great figure immediately expressed the apotheosis of that style of man. Thereafter fashion would go the other way and only poor people would be stout. — E.L. Doctorow

Skyjackers had a pretty abysmal success rate - once you commandeered a plane in American airspace, your odds of a happy ending were slim. After the epidemic ended in 1973, what folks tended to remember most about the skyjackers was their futility. — Brendan I. Koerner

I think companies trying to exercise a so-called inversion should be hit with an exit tax. So I want to change behaviors, and I am deeply distressed about quarterly capitalism, because I think it is causing businesses to make decisions that are not helping the long-term profitability of American corporations or the success of our economy. — Hillary Clinton

American inventiveness and the desire to build developed because we were guaranteed the right to own our success. — Rand Paul

If we didn't already have libraries, they would now have to be invented. They are the keys to American success in fully exploiting the information superhighways of the future. — James H. Billington

I got my degree. More importantly, I got a key to American opportunity. That's who we are - a nation that rewards ambition with opportunity. Where hard work can lead to success, no matter where you start. — Eva Longoria

I know of no American who starts from a higher level of aspiration than the journalist ... He plans to be both an artist and a moralist
a master of lovely words and merchant of sound ideas. He ends, commonly, as the most depressing jackass of his community
that is, if his career goes on to what is called a success. — H.L. Mencken

From the beginning, Judeo-Christian principles have been the foundation for American public dialogue and government policy. They serve as the solid basis for political activism in support of a better socioeconomic environment. Found in American homes, truth from the Hebrew Christian Bible has enabled individual liberty to prevail over secular empires because it is a practical message about reality from man's Creator.
In their quest for liberty, Americans focused upon the conspicuously self-evident "Laws of Nature and of Nature's God." It is the governing character of these principles (laws), such as humility, the Golden Rule, and the Ten Commandments, that leads to success. This is the sure foundation upon which man's right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" rests. Called "virtue" by America's Founding Fathers, the impartial and divine element frees man to do what is right. "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty" (2 Cor. 3:17). — David A. Norris

Linda Brewer's example is inspiring, colorful and potentially very funny. Her journey also exists firmly in the Heartland tradition of American success stories and comedies. — David Duchovny

The American success formula is first to get a home of your own, then to get a car of your own so you don't have to stay in that home of your own. — Sam Levenson

The most important domestic challenge facing the U.S. at the close of the twentieth century is the re-creation of fatherhood as avital social role for men. At stake is nothing less than the success of the American experiment. For unless we reverse the trend of fatherlessness, no other set of accomplishments
not economic growth or prison construction or welfare reform or better schools
will succeed in arresting the decline of child well-being and the spread of male violence. To tolerate the trend of fatherlessness is to accept the inevitability of continued social recession. — David Blankenhorn

This very individualistic form of Protestant Christianity that became so basic in English and then American life is to a large degree responsible for the historical success of Britain and America. — Walter Russell Mead

The American oligarchy spares no pains in promoting the belief that it does not exist, but the success of its disappearing act depends on equally strenuous efforts on the part of an American public anxious to believe in egalitarian fictions and unwilling to see what is hidden in plain sight. — Michael Lind

Bernard Harris is a great example of the American success story. In Dream Walker he describes how he is trying to pass on his experience and success to the next generation
we can all learn from his real life story. — Craig R. Barrett

The success [of the X-Men], I think, is for two reasons. The first is that, creatively, the book was close to perfect ... but the other reason is that it was a book about being different in a culture where, for the first time in the West, being different wasn't just accepted, but was also fashionable. I don't think it's a coincidence that gay rights, black rights, the empowerment of women and political correctness all happened over those twenty years and a book about outsiders trying to be accepted was almost the poster-boy for this era in American culture. — Mark Millar

The American Dream was not about government's taking huge sums of money (under the label of "taxation") from citizens by force. The American Dream was about individualism and the opportunity to achieve success without interference from others. — Robert Ringer

Pound was silly, bumptious, extravagantly generous, annoying, exhibitionistic; Eliot was sensible, cautious, retiring, soothing, shy. Though Pound wrote some brilliant passages, on the whole he was a failure as a poet (sometimes even in his own estimation); Eliot went from success to success and is still quoted
and misquoted
by thousands of people who have never read him. Both men were expatriates by choice, but Eliot renounced his American citizenship and did his best to become assimilated with his fellow British subjects, while Pound always remained an American in exile. — T.S. Mathews

How you got your college education mattered most." And two experiences stood out from the poll of more than one million American workers, students, educators, and employers: Successful students had one or more teachers who were mentors and took a real interest in their aspirations, and they had an internship related to what they were learning in school. The most engaged employees, said Busteed, consistently attributed their success in the workplace to having had a professor or professors "who cared about them as a person," or having had "a mentor who encouraged their goals and dreams," or having had "an internship where they applied what they were learning." Those workers, he found, "were twice as likely to be engaged with their work and thriving in their overall well-being." There's a message in that bottle. — Thomas L. Friedman

As God was expunged from American life, idols came in to fill the void; idols of sensuality, idols of greed, of money, of success, comfort, materialism, pleasure, sexual immorality, self-worship, self-obsession. The sacred increasingly disappeared, and the profane took its place. — Jonathan Cahn

James Brown hid everything, and in the game of instant information he lost big-time, because the information machine turns a truth into a lie and a lie into the truth, transforms superstitions and stereotypes into fact with such ease and fluidity that after a while you get to believing as I do, that the media is not a reflection of the American culture but rather is teaching it. As long as James Brown was selling records he let that craziness run. He didn't care. The media worked in his favor and helped fuel his success. But it killed his public reputation and once the success was gone once the head disappeared, the body followed. — James McBride

9:37, the west wall of the Pentagon was hit by hijacked American Airlines Flight 77, a Boeing 757. The crash caused immediate and catastrophic damage. All 64 people aboard the airliner were killed,as were 125 people inside the Pentagon (70 civilians and 55 military service members). One hundred six people were seriously injured and transported to area hospitals.192 While no emergency response is flawless, the response to the 9/11 terror= ist attack on the Pentagon was mainly a success for three reasons:first,the strong professional relationships and trust established among emergency responders; second, the adoption of the Incident Command System; and third, the pursuit of a regional approach to response. Many fire and police agencies that responded had extensive — Anonymous

As you know, I have over the years written critically about the U.N. I have consistently stressed in my writings that American leadership is critical to the success of the U.N., an effective U.N., one that is true to the original intent of its charter's framers. — John Bolton

Often, these downplay the power of cultural imperialism - in that sense, playing the game of US interests - by reassuring us that the global success of American mass culture is not as bad as all that. — Fredric Jameson

Let us be thankful for the fools,' Mark Twain wrote with typically dark humor in 1897. 'But for them the rest of us could not succeed.' Of all the paradoxes of failure in America, surely this is the darkest. Long ago, we saw through old fables of rags to riches; it is still fun to dream, but we know that we are partaking of a cultural myth. But if we do not quite believe in that kind of success, our faith in the myths of failure is unshaken. We are merrily cynical about whether the average tycoon really tugged on those bootstraps, but we still believe with deadly seriousness that the reasons for failure are usually individual-- "in the man." Failure is not the dark side of the American Dream; it is the foundation of it. The American Dream gives each of us the chance to be a born loser. — Scott A. Sandage

The road to success is not easy to navigate, but with hard work, drive and passion, it's possible to achieve the American dream. — Tommy Hilfiger

Success. I turned back to my sandwich, only to find that it wasn't there anymore. Maybe because it had been hijacked.
"Give me that!" I told the vamp, who was holding it firmly against his chest, a determined look on his face.
"What ees zat?" he demanded, eyeing my prize.
"Cheese." I held it up.
"Zat ees not cheese."
"How do you know?"
"Eet is orange."
"A lot of cheese is orange."
"Non! No cheese ees that color. Cheese comes from zee milk. Zee milk, eet ees white. When 'ave you seen milk that looks like zat?"
I held up the square of little slices and pointed at the bold-faced label. "Processed American Cheese."
He snatched the package, without letting go of his hostage. And eyed it warily. "Eet says 'cheese food.'" He looked up, obviously perplexed. "What ees thees? Zee cheese, it does not eat. — Karen Chance

I used to know a carnival man turned preacher who said the key to his success was understanding the people of what he called Snake's Navel, Arkansas. He said in Snake's Navel, the biggest thing going on Saturday night was the Dairy Queen. He said you could get the people there to do damn near anything
pollute their own water, work at five-dollar-an-hour jobs, drive fifty miles to a health clinic
as long as you packaged it right. That meant you gave them a light show and faith healings and blow-down-the-walls gospel music with a whole row of American flags across the stage. He said what they liked best, though
what really got them to pissing all over themselves
was to be told it was other people going to hell and not them. He said people in Snake's Navel wasn't real fond of homosexuals and Arabs and Hollywood Jews, although he didn't use them kinds of terms in his sermons. — James Lee Burke

Thomas Merton, the American monk, pointed out that we may spend our whole life climbing the ladder of success, only to find when we get to the top that our ladder is leaning against the wrong wall. — Richard Rohr

Although the Civil War was an apocalyptic success in the sense that it brought an end to nearly a century of struggle and broken hopes regarding the ultimate extinction of African American slavery, it also combined new freedoms, as in other major revolutions, with shock, breakdown, trauma, and tragedy. Neither desired nor accurately anticipated by leaders in the North and South, the war dramatized the failure of the whole American system of political negotiation and compromise that had never weakened the institution of slavery but had supported democratic government for whites for over eighty years. < ... > Moreover, the long-term outcome of this revolutionary decision would be determined within a context of sectional hate and bitterness, political revenge, and competing presssures for reconciliation, reunion, and forgiveness. — David Brion Davis

Appealing to our subconscious emotions rather than our conscious intellects, advertisements are designed to exploit the discontentments fostered by the American dream, the constant desire for social success and the material rewards that accompany it. — Sonia Maasik

Seeing is believing, and if an American success is to count for anything in the world it must be clothed in the raiment of property. As often as not it isn't the money itself that means anything; it is the use of money as the currency of the soul. — Lewis H. Lapham

I once read a question that somone used to begin their self-assessment: who do you most admire and why? If you are an american and have a TV in your house, you'd probably be tempted to list some sports figure, actor, singer, artist, successful businessman, or influential leader. We have been led to equate greatness with success, talent, power and recognition. Would we include on our list a single mom or dad who has faithfully served their family, the person who volunteers at the soup kitchen or homeless shelter, the guy who shovels snow for the elderly couple down the street or the soldier serving somewhere around the globe? — Donna Mull

beyond their right - and now they would be made to pay for it. Envy was being acted out, as never before.'62 It led to the murder of six million Jews in the Second World War. Today, I find envy laced through the statements of European and Indian intellectuals about America. Arundhati Roy's essay after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington is an example. Like many anti-American intellectuals writing in the days after the attack, Roy claimed that it was the direct result of American foreign policy - the implication being that America somehow deserved what had happened. There is widespread anti-American sentiment in the world which regards the United States as arrogant, indifferent to human suffering, consumerist, and contemptuous of international law. Much of this is probably correct, but I find that some of it is inspired by envy of America's success. — Gurcharan Das

Success is somebody else's failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty. — Ursula K. Le Guin

We expect 'Narcos' will be an enormous success throughout everywhere in the world and maybe out-index in Latin America, given the Brazilian star and Brazilian director and heavy Latin American cast and that we shot the show entirely on location in Colombia. — Ted Sarandos

We're not so free that we don't have to listen to rules, and laws, and regulations. Those are important. But the spirit, the freedom of the spirit, that's what I think of American Dream, that we are free here to do what we want to do, what we set out to do. — Martha Stewart

There are significant differences between the American and European version of capitalism. The American traditiionally emphasizes the need for limited government, light regulations, low taxes and maximum labour-market flexibility. Its success has been shown above all in the ability to create new jobs, in which it is consistently more successful than Europe. — Margaret Thatcher

The American Dream has always focused on building a better life for yourself and your family, striving for success, and even fleeing from religious prosecution. — Marc Veasey

If success attends my steps, honor and glory await my name-if defeat, still shall it be said we died like brave men, and conferred honor, even in death, on the American Name. — Zebulon Pike

Part of the success of This American Life, I think, is due to the fact that none of us sound like we should be on the radio. We don't sound professional; we sound like people you would know. — Sarah Vowell

Land Grant College Act is the jewel of Republican reform. It had not occurred to any other country to educate their farmers and workers. When the British studied the reasons for American success in 1851, the consensus was that Americans workers were well educated. So they didn't oppose progress the way British workers did. — Charles R. Morris

Success, instead of giving freedom of choice, becomes a way of life. There's no country I've been to where people, when you come into a room and sit down with them, so often ask you, "What do you do?" And, being American, many's the time I've almost asked that question, then realized it's good for my soul not to know. For a while! Just to let the evening wear on and see what I think of this person without knowing what he does and how successful he is, or what a failure. We're ranking everybody every minute of the day. — Arthur Miller