Owen Wister Quotes

We are Americans first, Americans last, and Americans always.

Whenever people in that part of the world asked Patterson about the wonders of America, the possibilities and the hope of America, Patterson would say that it was a good and fine place but all the Americans were running it into the ground and that it would be a far better place if it had no Americans.

America's exceptionalism, American leadership, the American model, the American values are not [first with Donald Trump] - they're something that end at the border.

The Americans have many virtues, but they have not Faith and Hope. I know no two words whose meaning is more lost sight of.

What "Make America Great" means is it doesn't mean race, and it doesn't mean gender, and it doesn't mean sexual orientation, and it doesn't mean anything identity politics related that seems to appeal to the Democrat Party. It's about a culture. It's about an identity. It's about an idea - the American idea, the American ideal.

You are American, whether you profess Judaism, Catholicism, Protestantism, whether you adhere to Islam, or whether you believe in nothing at all. And you're as American as anybody else, whatever your religious beliefs. But try not to get caught up in media stereotypes of your neighbors and of your country. Think about people that you know and how they treat you. As you get to know someone, it matters not what religious background they have, or what their nationality is, or where they came from. And I think that's how Americans really do relate to each other on a personal level.

America, the country of my heart, my second home.

I loved your country [America] before I knew it.

Of all the hokum with which this country [America] is riddled, the most odd is the common notion that it is free of class distinctions.

In the first place we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the man's becoming in very fact an American, and nothing but an American.

If America has a civic religion, the First Amendment is its central article of faith.

We should only admit into America those who share our values and respect our people.

I'm fascinated by America...it's so odd.

The core of the American set of beliefs has remained pretty constant.

I like the Americans for a great many reasons. I like them because even the modern thing called industrialism has not entirely destroyed in them the very ancient thing called democracy. I like them because they have a respect for work which really curbs the human tendency to snobbishness.

I like to talk about America. It's so mysterious.

It is absurd to say that there are neither ruins nor curiosities in America when they have their mothers and their manners.

It is rather the nature of America - our freewheeling, outspoken, prosperous, liberty-loving citizens extend equality to women, homosexuals, minorities, and almost anyone who comes to our shores, and thereby create desire and with it shame for that desire. Indeed, it is worse still than that: Precisely because we worry publicly that we are insensitive, our enemies scoff privately that we in fact are too sensitive - what we think is liberality and magnanimity they see as license and decadence. If we don't have confidence in who we are, why should they?

Where is it written that if you don't like religion you are somehow disqualified from being a legitimate American? What was Mark Twain, a Russian?

I think Americans are good-hearted, open-minded people and race doesn't enter into this - at all.

I'm the first one in my family born with all my rights. I'm a ninth generation American.

If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population.

Those aren't the kinds of folks who represent our core American values.

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.

The United States is my subject, but as Hawthorne once wrote, "the United States are suited for many admirable purposes, but not to live in."