Good American Quotes

“Bah! Doesn't matter. Don't want him for our Ayah. She should marry within her kind, a good Chinese boy-"
Mari had to smile. Mr. Hsu rarely took to foreigners, and this was yet another proof of how easy it was for Ayah to worm her way into people's hearts. She was just so ... sweet. Even when she was also so freaking stubborn, she was just too sweet about it.
"You do remember she's American, right?" Mari teased.
"No," Mr. Hsu snapped, "I don't." He ended the call.”

— Marian Tee

“I've been asked a lot for my view on American health care. Well, 'it would be a good idea,' to quote Gandhi.”

— Paul Farmer

“I do this real moron thing, and it's called thinking. And apparently I'm not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions.”

— George Carlin

“Dad, as a good American, believed his newspapers.”

— Upton Sinclair

“After he got hammered one night at a high place about Lens Lake called the Grade, his parents found him standing in the kitchen.
"What if there was a language with only one word in it?" he asked.
"It would be easy to learn," said his mother.
"And with that word they would say everything every time they spoke," said Pierre.
"Yeah, that would be some language," said his father. "What are you on?"
"Just drinking," said Pierre. "Just good old American drinking.”

— Tom Drury

“Once upon a time there was a war ... and a young American who thought of himself as the Quiet American and the Ugly American, and who wished to be neither, who wanted instead to be the Wise American, or the Good American, but who eventually came to witness himself as the Real American and finally as simply the Fucking American. That's me.”

— Denis Johnson

“Like a good American, I wanted to sue somebody. But like a good librarian, I just sat at my desk and waited.”

— Rebecca Makkai

“A good American makes propaganda for whatever existence has forced him to become.”

— Saul Bellow

“The author meets an African-American who observes that his fellows who begin with aspirations to a good education, solid career, and the raising of a family slowly lose that incentive. Even those who have a college education, he observes, need to take menial jobs and begin to look for excitement in less productive places.”

— John Howard Griffin

“I know there are some good American police. But I grew up in a country where we were afraid of the police.”

— Peter Sis

“Webster said, 'Time them skeeters get done with that old man, his French blood will be all gone and he will speak American as good as we do.”

— Peter Matthiessen

“I wouldn't even have braces on my teeth. I think they are horrible, and this idea that everyone should conform and be perfect is ridiculous. I like the fact I have good old-fashioned British teeth with a big gap. Who wants those gleaming white cosmetically enhanced American teeth?”

— Georgia May Jagger

“Their point of resemblance to each other and their difference from so many American women, lay in the fact that they were all happy to exist in a man's world
they preserved their individuality through men and not by opposition to them. They would all three have made alternatively good courtesans or good wives not by the accident of birth but through the greater accident of finding their man or not finding him.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I would like to perform more in English. But there have to be many good things gathered for me to be willing to do a movie. I watch trailers of every new American movie and I'm, like, 'OK, I'm not missing anything!'”

— Ludivine Sagnier

“I'd say the majority of my friends are Australians, although I have some good American friends, but I think with Aussies, we just get it. We don't take each other too seriously, which is a relief.”

— Bella Heathcote

“We're trying to build a platform utilizing the Internet that allows the good American people to speak out about their frustration about the polarized country that we live in politically.”

— Hamilton Jordan

“I can only hope that, upon learning of my imminent execution, Good Samaritans in Colorado will be moved to ship me a plump love apple from their backyard patch - and should they happen to be friendly with Hunter S. Thompson, perhaps persuade him to inject it with a little something beforehand. Hunter will know just what I mean, and trust me, it won't affect the taste of the tomato.*
*When I wrote those lines, Thompson was alive and blooming. Now, with his sad demise, still more color has faded out of the American scene. Where are the men today whose lives are not beige; where are the writers whose style is not gray?”

— Tom Robbins

“Never lose your faith in the American Dream. She's a nation under God, and God has never let a good American down.”

— Michael Moriarty

“One of those gated communities where there's one token African-American couple and four token Jewish couples. Children and vegetarians are not allowed. Residents must vote Republican and own small dogs with rhinestone collars, stupid eyes, and names that end in i. Taffi is good, Cassi is better, and something like Rififi is the total shit.”

— Stephen King

“From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not.”

— Diane Wakoski

“I'm Native American, so it's in my blood to always want brothers and friends. I'm a good brotherhood guy.”

— Duane Chapman

“I find respect for a mediocre British composer, as opposed to a really good American, ridiculous because they automatically respect a composer if he's from England.”

— John Corigliano

“I wanted to be what my high-school civics and history teacher thought of as a good American. That automatically involved taking an interest in government.”

— Olivia De Havilland

“Political civility is not about being polite to each other. It's about reclaiming the power of 'We the People' to come together, debate the common good and call American democracy back to its highest values amid our differences.”

— Parker Palmer

“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

“During the late 1910s and early '20s, immigrant workers at the Ford automotive plant in Dearborn, Michigan, were given free, compulsory "Americanization" classes. In addition to English lessons, there were lectures on work habits, personal hygiene, and table manners. The first sentence they memorized was "I am a good American.”

— Anne Fadiman

“Shit, money, and the Word, the three American truths, powering the American mobility, claimed the Slothrops, clasped them for good to the country's fate.”

— Thomas Pynchon

“For over a year I continued to submit mss, and have them rejected - the last few with rejection letters indicated the story was pretty good, but I was American.”

— Nora Roberts

“I have always thought that being a good American is appreciating the world, not just your own country.”

— Johnny Weir

“I made, over the years in Cambridge, several very good American friends, and America appeared to me, a land of promise in every sense of that word, a land of freedom from the inhibitions and restrictions that I felt in England.”

— Peter Shaffer

“I do love my country. I don't think I'm particularly a good American. I don't know what makes a good American. Other than somebody who - I like people who let other people alone. I think that's a pretty good American. And I keep my hands to myself. So I'm an OK American.”

— Stephen Colbert

“'Shall We Dance?' takes a small, exquisite Japanese movie and turns it into a big, stupid American movie. Still, it must be said that as glossy and overproduced as the thing is, it's a good big, stupid American movie.”

— Stephen Hunter

“Harry had worked his way through the American Dream and come to the conclusion that is was composed of a good lunch and a deep red wine that could soar.”

— Colum McCann

“I was too prissy, too refined, too abstemious, too French to be a good American writer.”

— Edmund White

“I've been working with good directors - the Wachowski brothers, Spike Lee, Terry Gilliam, Mel Gibson ... I love American movies, but I love European movies, too, and I want to do both.”

— Monica Bellucci

“In the Culture of Character, the ideal self was serious, disciplined, and honorable. What counted was not so much the impression one made in public as how one behaved in private. The word personality didn't exist in English until the eighteenth century, and the idea of "having a good personality" was not widespread until the twentieth. But when they embraced the Culture of Personality, Americans started to focus on how others perceived them. They became captivated by people who were bold and entertaining. "The social role demanded of all in the new Culture of Personality was that of a performer," Susman famously wrote. "Every American was to become a performing self.”

— Susan Cain

“I'm conscious of race whenever I'm writing, just as I'm conscious of class, religion, human psychology, politics - everything that makes up the human experience. I don't think I can do a good job if I'm not paying attention to what's meaningful to people, and in American culture, there isn't anything that informs human interaction more than the idea of race.”

— Dwayne McDuffie

“Hey, I saw this old British movie, all the people spoke so different, you could hardly understand them. But everyone here speaks American as good as you and me. What's with that?”

— Max Barry

“Why the hell not run a race across the United States? A balls-out, shoot-the-moon, f***-the-establishment rumble from New York to Los Angeles to prove what we had been harping about for years, for example, that good drivers in good automobiles could employ the American Interstate system the same way the Germans were using their Autobahns? Yes, make high-speed travel by car a reality! Truth and justice affirmed by an overtly illegal act.”

— Brock Yates

“The true history of Vietnamese civilian suffering does not fit comfortably into America's preferred postwar narrative - the tale of a conflict nobly fought by responsible commanders and good American boys, who should not be tainted by the occasional mistakes of a few 'bad apples' in their midst.”

— Nick Turse

“To be free ... to walk the good American earth as equal citizens, to live without fear, to enjoy the fruits of our toil, to give our children every opportunity in life
that dream which we have held so long in our hearts is today the destiny that we hold in our hands.”

— Paul Robeson

“We're looking at ideas to remodel Arrowhead Stadium. It's 30 years old and it's not a good American soccer stadium. We're looking at ways to improve Arrowhead-which is oriented for NFL games
for our spectators.”

— Lamar Hunt

“A good many observers have remarked that if equality could come at once, the Negro would not be ready for it. I submit that the white American is even more unprepared.”

— Martin Luther

“I've always felt, as a writer, that radicals are fascinating because they're relations, they have a place in the American family. They're the relatives everyone wishes would go away. They're the embarrassments to decorum and good taste.”

— E.L. Doctorow

“Christians must go beyond criticizing the degradation of American culture, roll up their sleeves, and get to work on positive solutions. The only way to drive out bad culture is with good culture.”

— Nancy Pearcey

“When I look out the window, I exhale a prayer of thanks for the color green, for my children's safety, for the simple acts of faith like planting a garden that helped see us through another spring, another summer. And I inhale some kind of promise to protect my kids' hopes and good intentions we began with in this country. Freedom of speech, the protection of diversity - these are the most important ingredients of American civil life and my own survival. If I ever took them for granted, I don't know.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

“All good American literature is always interested in people who are ambiguously heroic, like Gatsby.”

— John Green

“Burn my Flag and I will shoot you ... but I'll shoot you with a lot of love, like a good American”

— Johnny Cash

“American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.”

— George Santayana

“NAFTA means jobs. American jobs, and good paying American jobs. If I
didn't believe that, I wouldn't support this agreement.”

— William J. Clinton