Purely American Quotes & Sayings

People know that I have a great love for cinema. Not just for commercial cinema, but for the 'cinema d'auteur.' But to me, two of the great 'auteurs' are actually actors and they both happen to be French. One is Alain Delon and the other is Jean-Paul Belmondo. — Harvey Weinstein

Our proper mode in situations where demand was high and supply low was to elbow, jostle, crowd, and hustle, and, if all that failed, to bribe, flatter, exaggerate, and lie. I was uncertain whether these traits were genetic, deeply cultural, or simply a rapid evolutionary development. We had been forced to adapt to ten years of living in a bubble economy pumped up purely by American imports; three decades of on-again, off-again war, including the sawing in half of the country in '54 by foreign magicians and the brief Japanese interregnum of World War II; and the previous century of avuncular French molestation. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

I despise the cowardly clinging to life, purely for the sake of life, that seems so deeply ingrained in the American temperament. — Christopher Lasch

Where do we find happiness? We pursue it, search for it, kill ourselves trying to find it, and all the time it's just here ... It comes just when we've stopped expecting anything, stopped hoping, stopped being afraid. — Irene Nemirovsky

We have here a forecast of the long history of American politics, the mobilization of lower-class energy by upper-class politicians, for their own purposes. This was not purely deception; it involved, in part, a genuine recognition of lower-class grievances, which helps to account for its effectiveness as a tactic over the centuries. As — Howard Zinn

The reinvention of American culture as purely the self catapulted Las Vegas to prominence. The city took sin and made it choice
a sometimes ambiguous choice, but choice nonetheless. Combined with a visionary approach to experience that melded Hollywood and Americans' taste for comfort and self-deception, Las Vegas grew into the last American frontier city, as foreign at times as Prague but as quintessential as Peoria. In Las Vegas, you can choose your fantasy; in the rest of America, you don't always get to pick. — Hal Rothman

In the event of a violent revolution, we would be sorely outnumbered. And when it was all over, the Negro would face the same unchanged conditions, the same squalor and deprivation-the only difference being that his bitterness would be even more intense, his disenchantment even more abject. Thus, in purely practical as well as moral terms, the American Negro has no rational alternative to nonviolence. — Martin Luther King Jr.

He was sorry, genuinely sorry, for the pain she was in. Yet the revelation had caused certain other feelings - feelings he usually kept under tight rein, considering them both misguided and dangerous - to flex inside him, to test their strength against their restraining bonds. — Robert Galbraith

The idea of an isolated American painting , so popular in this country during the thirties, seems absurd to me, just as the idea of a purely American mathematics or physics would seem absurd ... And in another sense, the problem doesn't exist at all; or, if it did, would solve itself: An American is an American and his painting would naturally be qualified by the fact, whether he wills or not. But the basic problems of contemporary painting are independent of any one country. — Jackson Pollock

Secularism in the Christian world was an attempt to resolve the long and destructive struggle of church and state. Separation, adopted in the American and French Revolutions and elsewhere after that, was designed to prevent two things: the use of religion by the state to reinforce and extend its authority; and the use of the state power by the clergy to impose their doctrines and rules on others. This is a problem long seen as purely Christian, not relevant to Muslims or for that matter to Jews, for whom a similar problem has arisen in Israel. Looking at the contemporary Middle East, both Muslim and Jewish, one must ask whether this is still true
or whether Muslims and Jews may perhaps have caught a Christian disease and might therefore consider a Christian remedy. — Bernard Lewis

Our parents taught us to love God, love our family and love our country. Their own grandparents were immigrants. Their first language may not have been English, but the hopes and dreams they had for their children were purely American. — Martin O'Malley

Gwen found herself in possession, coolly palmed in her thoughts like a dollar coin, of the idea that she was about to bring another abandoned son into the world, the son of an abandoned son. The heir to a history of disappointment and betrayal, violence, and loss. Centuries of loss, empires of disappointment. All the anger that Gwen had been feeling, not just today or over the past nine months but all her life
feeding on to it like a sun, using it to power her engines, to fund her stake in the American dream
struck her for the first time as a liability. As purely tragic. There was no way to partake of it without handing it on down the generations. — Michael Chabon

Small mistakes tend to lead to large ones. Ours is a lifetime appoinment, and all you have is your reputation. Once it's gone, it doesn't comeback. — David Baldacci

Children born to-day may see the beginnings of a genuine state church in the Republic, with a hierarchy of live wires and a purely American theology. I regret that I am too old to wait for it, for if it comes it will be a lulu. — H.L. Mencken

Those that have lost their lives to suicide were good people, who were in deep, deep pain. Keep speaking about mental illness and keep it out of the darkness. — Mariel Hemingway

The important desideratum is freedom of the market; a country or region will often best develop, depending on conditions of resources or the market, by concentrating on one or two items and then exchanging them for other items produced elsewhere. — Murray Rothbard

As for the public, the PR man, like the advertising expert and others who deal with people in the lump, including a number of would-be-statesmen and redeemers-at-large, conceive of that body as composed of non-ideographic units which are to be regarded not as ourselves but as, ultimately, gadgets of electrochemical circuitry operated by a push-button system of remote control. In fact, in dealing with the public in a purely technological society, the very notion of self is bypassed by various appeals to an undifferentiated unconscious, such appeals often having little or no relation to the vendible object or idea; in this connection history gives us to contemplate the fact that the psychologist J.B. Watson, the founder of American behaviorism, wound up in the advertising business. So history may become parable. — Robert Penn Warren

They express concern that technology creates social isolation, as people rely on tech-based communication rather than richer face-to-face encounters.9 We find a different story. Technologies such as the internet and mobile phones help people manage a larger, more diverse set of relationships. Consider — Lee Rainie

Well," said Winterbourne, "when you deal with natives you must go by the custom of the place. Flirting is a purely American custom; it doesn't exist here. So when you show yourself in public with Mr. Giovanelli, and without your mother - " "Gracious! — Henry James

I will bear any thing you can inflict upon me with Patience, even to the laying down of my Life, to shew my Obedience to you in other Cases; but I cannot be patient, I cannot be passive, when my Virtue is at Stake! — Samuel Richardson

Any story dealing, however seriously, with homosexual love is taken to be a story about homosexuality while stories dealing with heterosexual love are seen as stories about the individual people they portray. This is as much a problem today for American filmmakers who cannot conceive of the presence of gay characters in a film unless the specific subject of the film is homosexuality. Lesbians and gay men are thereby classified as purely sexual creatures, people defined solely by their sexual urges. — Vito Russo

It is incorrect to classify the revolt of the Negro as simply a radical conflict of black against white or as a purely American problem. Rather, we are today seeing a global rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter. — Malcolm X

Somebody can become a celebrity for being stupid. That is what it's turned into. — Kate Hudson

There is one day that is ours. Thanksgiving Day is the one day that is purely American. — O. Henry

Because I'm English, I try not to make any purely American references, because I want to limit how much I'm pretending to be American. — James Hunter

Deep inside each human being is a spirit that hungers for movement and for growth. A live and burgeoning ball of energy, the spirit naturally moves, expands, gyrates - dances, even - purely by virtue of its desire for freedom. It craves beauty over entertainment, meaning over triviality, and knowledge over sensation. American society devotes few harbors to the trade of truth. Too often we sacrifice the pursuit of knowledge, distracted instead by sparkling material things. — Joe De Sena

Every piece of technology, every piece of art, basically everything manmade comes from an idea. — Pharrell Williams

There appears to be a lot of confusion about the biological benefits of elevated CO2 because the popular media typically fails to report them. Doomsday scenarios of global warming are much more dramatic than the good news of global greening. — Keith E. Idso

To me, punk is about being an individual and going against the grain and standing up and saying 'This is who I am'. — Joey Ramone

Restricted immigration is not an offensive but purely a defensive action. It is not adopted in criticism of others in the slightest degree, but solely for the purpose of protecting ourselves. We cast no aspersions on any race or creed, but we must remember that every object of our institutions of society and government will fail unless America be kept American. — Calvin Coolidge

A small sample of some girl-written words
That summer was a new beginning, a new end.
When I look back, I remember my slippery hands of paint and the sound of Papa's feet on Munich Street, and I know that a small piece of the summer of 1942 belonged to only one man. Who else would do some paintwork for the price of half a cigarette? That was Papa, that was typical, and I loved him. — Markus Zusak