John Ratzenberger Quotes

The ideal American type is perfectly expressed by the Protestant, individualist, anti-conformist, and this is the type that is in the process of disappearing. In reality there are few left.

The America I love is slipping away.

I really feel like we have drifted too far away from real America.

I believe in the country America used to be.

I think everybody must be aware that this society is a whole lot shakier now than it was before the war. I was trying to examine, in 'Dog Soldiers,' the process of that blow falling on America.

Baseball is what we were, and football is what we have become.

Everybody in America started to define themselves by all these things they had around them. And all of a sudden it came tumbling down. So the old American dream has died, and that is a good thing.

The real 1960s began on the afternoon of November 22, 1963. It came to seem that Kennedy's murder opened some malign trap door in American culture, and the wild bats flapped out.

On a certain level, I don't think there is an answer to what the American way is, because it is constantly being re-defined. It's also been exploited and capitalized upon and politicized by one side or the other to the point that a certain degree of cynicism has attached itself to that term.

The American Dream is a phrase we'll have to wrestle with all of our lives. It means a lot of things to different people. I think we're redefining it now.

America is the civilization of people engaged in transforming themselves. In the past, the stars of the performance were the pioneer and the immigrant. Today, it is youth and the Black.

I think New York City most represents what it is that America in general aspires to. It's big; it's dense. I've known this city from all of its social arcs. The best that's in America is yet to come. The worst that's in America is yet to come.

I kind of like America. I'm not looking for it to be fundamentally transformed into something else. I don't want it to become like Europe.

This will arguably be the third great revolution of America, if we can prove that we literally can live without having a dominant European culture.

The worst thing you can do is to turn over your life to a political party that simply is going to use you. And the evidence is clear. Look at all of these groups that have been voting Democrat for 50 years. Take a look at the towns that have been nothing but Democrat, towns and cities, for 30 years, and just take a look at them. The evidence is right there. We got the strong, silent type, and they have been replaced by this pajama-clad kid that the Regime used to sell Obamacare. The pajama kid! The nerd in his pajamas.

I feel blessed in the knowledge that I probably belong to the last generation that will remember what we call "traditional America."

The American mood, perhaps even the American character, has changed. There are few manifestations any longer of the old American self-assurance which so irritated Dickens. Instead, there is a sense of frustration so perceptible that even our politicians have attempted to exploit it.

How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.

If we have an element of Americans here that reject western civilization, and that's a big element, that reject western civilization, then what have we? This is an effort on the left I think to break down the American civilization and the American culture and turn it into something entirely different.

Fitzgerald could sense that America was poised on the edge of a vast transformation, and wrote a novel bridging his moment and ours. The Great Gatsby made manifest precisely what Fitzgerald’s contemporaries couldn’t bear to see, and thus it is not only the Jazz Age novel par excellence, but also the harbinger of its decline and fall.

America didn’t bypass or escape civilization. It did something far more profound, far cleverer: it simply changed what civilization could be.

Can it be that we, too, are ready to embrace the foul concepts of atheism? Somebody is tampering with America's soul, I leave it to you who that somebody is.

The greatest myth of all is what America is. I think that America is such an incredibly dynamic place because of immigration.

The nation which once held the creed that greatness is achieved by production, is now told that it is achieved by squalor.

Back when the country was strong, back before Elvis and before the Vietnam war came along.