Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

Americans, perhaps more than most people, have pondered the question of who they are and what their country is.

My ambition was always to be a perfect picture of an American.

For other nations, utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon.

I'm surprised and disappointed in American culture.

I'm interested in what it means to live in America. I'm interested in the kind of country that we live in and leave our kids. I'm interested in trying to define what that country is. I got the chutzpa or whatever you want to say to believe that if I write a really good about it, it's going to make a difference.

France will always be France no matter what, but America involves striving toward an ideal.

Americans' great and secret fear is that America may turn out to be a phenomenon rather than a civilization.

Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well, that is the way I know I am an American. America is the only idealistic nation in the world.

In America the geography is sublime, but the men are not.

Hey, it’s the American way.

Society doesn't have values. People have values.

For more than 70 years, the presidents of both parties believed that American security and prosperity were directly tied to the success of freedom in the world. And they knew that the success depended, in large part, on U.S. leadership. This mission came naturally, because it expressed the DNA of American idealism.

Americans are locked into our traditions.

America is a country in which I see the most persistant idealism and the blandest of cynicism and the race is on between its vitality and its decadence.

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.

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

America is the only idealistic nation in the world.

The trouble with our ideals is that if we live up to all of them, we become impossible to live with.

Perhaps no custom reveals our character as a Nation so clearly as our celebration of Thanksgiving Day.

It was fashionable, youre supposed to be a married lady, so I did.

Every man has been brought up with the idea that decent women don't pop in and out of bed; he has always been told by his mother that "nice girls don't." He finds, of course, when he gets older that this may be untrue-but only in a certain section of society.

No one in Germany laughs at vice, nor do they call it the fashion to corrupt and to be corrupted.

It would be easier for me to reject all established values, if I knew what they were.

I don't really know what Americans are like. I've no idea. I know a few things about them. In my imagination, they have warm peachy hearts, whereas the English have horrible spiteful withered hearts - success in England inspires envy - in America, it inspires hope.

No woman dresses below herself from mere caprice.