Yankee Doodle Quotes & Sayings

I believe the average Southerner would rather be found singing "Yankee Doodle" floating on ice in the Arctic Ocean while eating whale blubber with a fingernail file than taking his rolls or biscuits or bread or cornbread other than hot. Hot — Patricia B. Mitchell

I am the living death, a Memorial Day on wheels. I am your Yankee Doodle Dandy, your John Wayne come home, your Fourth of July firecracker exploding in the grave. — Ron Kovic

When I watched the Twin Towers fall, I said aloud to my naked friend, "There go our civil liberties." A few months later I called George Carlin and we were chatting about America's reaction to the attack. I told him my thoughts. He excused himself, put down the phone, and went and got his journal. As the Twin Towers fell, he had written, "There go our civil rights." I was so proud to have had a similar thought at a similar time to a genius. We were sad to be right. To react to an attack on our freedom with less freedom seems so deeply un-American. What ever happened to Yankee Doodle Dandy and "fuck you in the fucking neck"? — Penn Jillette

It seems whenever we get too high hat and too sophisticated for flag-waving some thug nation comes along and decides we're a pushover all ready to be blackjacked. And it isn't long before we're looking up mighty anxiously to be sure the flag is still waving over us. Jimmy Cagney as George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy — George M. Cohan

He cannot hold his wine; he has no head for it. Why, on no more than three glasses, for I absolutely poured him out no more, he was on the point of singing Yankee Doodle. Yankee Doodle, in a King's ship, upon my sacred honour! — Patrick O'Brian

Thus we come to the problem of determining what the poem is 'about.' Charles Altieri notes that '[a]n expression of the self can be one that is intended, the self's act, or one that is symptomatic, the act of a self not in control of what it manifests'(24) In 'Yankee Doodle,' and to a lesser extent in '$$$$$$," the interesting aspects of the poem are not 'the intended expression of the self.' The lack of explicitness is not suggestive in any positive sense because we feel that were things to be spelled out, this would weaken, not strengthen, the narrator's case by revealing the unacknowledged irrationality at the root of it. — Russell Harrison

I know only two tunes. One of them is 'Yankee Doodle' the other isn't. — Ulysses S. Grant

Gilbert: How Clark Gable turn every women's head so? Foolish young English girls would see a movie star in every GI with the same Yankee-doodle voice. Glamour in US privates named Jed, Buck or Chip, with their easy-come-by-gifts and Uncle Sam sweet-talk. Dreamboats in hooligans from Delaware or Arizona with fingernails that still carried soil from home, and eyes that crossed with any attempt at reading. Heart-throbs from men like those in the tea-shop, who dated their very close relatives and knew cattle as their mental equal. — Andrea Levy

New England clam chowder, made as it should be, is a dish to preach about, to chant praises and sing hymns and burn incense before. [ ... ] It is as American as the Stars and Stripes, as patriotic as the national Anthem. It is Yankee Doodle in a kettle. — Joseph C. Lincoln