American Life Quotes

I think American life would be better without Twitter, and I think we’d have a better country if the president was not on Twitter. What people say in a bar or a pub doesn’t necessarily merit being memorialised.

A lot of times when we work overseas we tend to put the experience of someone who lives overseas, a Chinese person or a Korean person or a Bosnian person, within the prism of an American life.

The death of anti-gay hate speech is no doubt being hastened by the head-spinning speed with which gays as a group – to say nothing of gay marriage – are becoming an unremarkable and even quite traditional parts of American life.

I got out of school in 2000, and I always wanted to be on ‘This American Life,’ since I first started telling stories. And that, I mean, that show is a little bit of a fortress. It’s really hard to get stuff on that show.

The American Legion has been a cornerstone of American life from the local to the federal level since the beginning, and serves as a constant reminder of the enormous contributions America’s armed service members have made to enrich our nation during and after their military service.

The moral and social aspiration proper to American life is, of course, the aspiration vaguely described by the word democratic; and the actual achievement of the American nation points towards an adequate and fruitful definition of the democratic ideal.

When dealing with American politics, you try to follow the money, and that’s where it leads you. It doesn’t take you to the electoral college or to Princeton. It takes you down the darker alleys of American life.

I don’t think American life requires you to be on Facebook. It does require you to have access to the Internet.

You’d have to put yourself back in the 1960s to understand how separate from the mainstream of American life soldiers felt themselves to be, because we knew that students and others were demonstrating pretty violently against what we were doing.

If you live close to an International Rescue Committee office in the United States, find out how you can assist a refugee family as they transition to American life. Invite a newly arrived family to your home for a welcoming meal. Listen to their hopes and dreams, and share your own.

The Jews integrated themselves into American life to the point that the argument that the Jews aren’t American sounded so stupid, that people stopped thinking it.

The Holocaust only emerged in American life after Israel‘s victory in the 1967 Six Day war against its Arab neighbours.

Primarily, we need to change 100 years of thinking, where we try to extend the promise of American life by moving things to Washington, and let’s move it the other way: less of Washington, more from ourselves.

The ADA prohibits discrimination and guarantees that people with disabilities receive the same opportunities as everyone else to participate in the mainstreams of American life, which includes participating in government programs and services.

When I was working on the unauthorized biography ‘Stan Musial: An American Life,’ which came out in 2011, old opponents recalled how Musial knew their names after they had been in the majors only a few days.

Evading military service has a long history in American life.

Oprah is just this goddess presiding over so much of American life, and her story is really interesting – the way she made herself, and the ruthlessness it took, and also the fantasizing that it took.

Because of the terrorist threat, the FBI and CIA have become as important as the military in preserving our freedom. Yet while thanking our military is standard practice in American life, no one thinks of thanking the FBI, the CIA, or the rest of the intelligence community for keeping us safe since 9/11.

Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life.

I think the name of the show, ‘This American Life’ – we named it that just because it seemed like it made the thing feel big. But we don’t think about whether it’s an American story or not. We happen to be Americans. I think for the stories to work, they have to be universal.

Deference has been codified in American life as political correctness. And political correctness functions like a despotic regime. It is an oppressiveness that spreads its edicts further and further into the crevices of everyday life.

The death of JFK to the resignation of Richard Nixon marked a great turning point in American life.

The one thing I’ve learned, getting out to all those foreign and domestic locales, is that people in every country of the ‘civilized‘ world wish – either secretly or openly – that they had the expressiveness, the flair, the I’m-so-glad-to-be-me spirit that black folks have made a part of American life.

Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.

For most Americans, work is central to their experience of the world, and the corporation is one of the fundamental institutions of American life, with an enormous impact, for good and ill, on how we live, think, and feel.

Journalism talk is part of the nonstop background noise of American life.

The search for happiness has long been a dominant feature of American life. It’s a byproduct of prosperity, not to mention the most famous line in the Declaration of Independence.

There is a paranoid streak in American life. Radio talk show hosts tend to foment that paranoid streak in American life.

That’s one of the things about the Tea Party people. They think corporations have too much influence in American life and they do.

I voted for Nader, and I have no doubts at all that it was the right thing to do because the Nader candidacy was extremely energising and a terrific phenomenon in American life, and I hope he continues.

Diversity has been written into the DNA of American life; any institution that lacks a rainbow array has come to seem diminished, if not diseased.

Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.

There is no price tag on an American life – whether it’s in Florida, Texas, or Puerto Rico.

I listen to ‘This American Life,’ ‘Serial,’ ‘S-Town,’ ‘Feast of Fun.’ I listened to ‘What’s the Tee?’ And that has really helped me throughout my entire drag career – podcasts have been a mainstay in my life as a drag artist.

It seems to me that the time for subtlety in our American life has passed.

West Indian cultural mentality and a North American life equals the perfect balance.

My idea at this time, which was slowly developing, was to create a comedie humaine with little people, average people – samples from every period in American life.

Trump has seized the Republican nomination by finding scapegoats for the economic hardships and disintegrating lives of working-class whites while giving these voters a reassuring but false promise of their restoration to the center of American life.