Pearl S. Buck Quotes

The first time I saw America was from my perch on the mast of a Spanish naval ship, where I could spot the Statue of Liberty reaching proudly into the open, endless American sky.

I really feel that my life story is a continuation of the Great American Dream - the immigrant who comes to this country and is allowed to excel. How many other countries would let me do that?

I was never meant to sit at home.

My family's story isn't special. What's special is the America that makes our story possible. Ours is a nation like no other, a place where great journeys can be made in a single generation. No matter who you are or where you come from, the path is always forward.

The fundamental, longtime American attitude has been to ask not where a person comes from but what are his personal qualities. On this basis men and women migrated from every quarter of the globe. By their hard work and their enormously varied talents they hewed a great nation out of a wilderness. By their dedication to liberty and equality they created a society reflecting man's most cherished ideas.

In the United States a man builds a house to spend his latter years in it and he sells it before the roof is on. He plants a garden and lets [rents] it just as the trees are coming into bearing. He brings a field into tillage and leaves other men to gather the crops. He embraces a profession and gives it up. He settles in a place which he soon afterward leaves to carry his changeable longings elsewhere. If his private affairs leave him any leisure he instantly plunges into the vortex of politics and if at the end of a year of unremitting labour he finds he has a few days' vacation, his eager curiosity whirls him over the vast extent of the United States, and he will travel fifteen hundred miles in a few days to shake off his happiness.

America did not tell the millions of men and women who came from every country in the world and who - with their hands, their intelligence and their heart - built the greatest nation in the world: "Come, and everything will be given to you." She said: "Come, and the only limits to what you'll be able to achieve will be your own courage and your own talent."

We need to remain a nation that doesn't just welcome but that celebrates legal immigrants who come here seeking to pursue the American Dream.

America's legacy has been crafted by generations of hard-working men and women who moved to the United States from all over the globe to pursue their dreams.

This is the America we know because we built it.

People, when they first come to America, whether as travelers or settlers, become aware of a new and agreeable feeling: that the whole country is their oyster.

Living in New York City, I am reminded by the Statue of Liberty that the United States of America has always welcomed those yearning to breathe free and seek a better life.

America was born in outrageous ambition, so bold as to be improbable. The deprived, the oppressed, the powerless from all over the globe came here with little more than the desire to realize themselves.

To me, you know, from my childhood I always had a fascination for United States.

What makes America special is that people come here, assimilate and become American with all of the rights and responsibilities citizenship bestows.

Certainly coming to America has been extraordinary.

In a sense, all Americans are battle-born. Our ancestors came here for something better.

Now we understand much more clearly. why people from all over the world want to come to New York and to America. It's called freedom.

There's a lot to love about America - freedom, the melting pot of diversity, individualism - all attractive concepts, especially to an introvert. In fact, the introverts were probably the first to feel crowded in England and to daydream about all the space they would find in the New World. Peace! Quiet!

I love the diversity of America. I love the plain, normal sense of humor Americans have. It is not wicked, like in some countries. And I also love how new America is.

For me, the American promise isn't just an idea or a theory - it's my life story.

The great thing about the United States and the historically magnetic effect it has had on a lot of people like me is its generosity, to put it simply.

I was born in an enemy country. Only in America can someone who came from that beginning do what I am doing. It would never happen in Germany or Japan.

People want to see this America, this real America.

America was and is the immigrant's dream.