285 Quotes About Americans

I can see him and I hate the bastard already: short-sighted and promiscuous, six foot three of gristle and bristle and pathos, of deep-voiced charm and casuistry. . . Business-like, inept and unintelligent, strong and infantile, like most American men, quick to wield chairs in a fight, vain, and who, at thirty still ten, turns the act of love into a kind of dysentery...

Tim Barger, the son of Aramco geologist Tom Barger, was the seventh American born in Saudi Arabia. He explained that Dhahran, Aramco’s headquarters located in the region where oil was originally found, was “deliberately placed there, away from society” because “the King didn’t really want Americans to mingle with Saudis anyway.” His impression of Abdul Aziz was that the king “just wanted Americans to go there, stay out of his hair, and produce oil and make him rich.

Americans had endured centuries of patronization by the British. One became inured to it after a while.

Americans on the average do not trust intellectuals, but they are cowed by power and stunned by celebrity.

In any event, the sloppy and fatuous nature of American good will can never be relied upon to deal with hard problems. These have been dealt with, when they have been dealt with at all, out of necessity—and in political terms, anyway, necessity means concessions made in order to stay on top.

Too many Americans are spurred to achieve, rather than to attach.

It was the serene cheerfulness of a man who has no nightmares, who feels at peace with himself and everyone else. They [Americans] were almost all of them like that. And it definitely got Maigret’s back up. It made him think of clothing that was too neat, too clean, too well-pressed.

And this is the straight dope, right here. These people are not exactly human. They don the dress but they're like monkeys dolled up in the circus. They're clever and can learn, but that is all.

What is important about immigration is how immigrants arrived and what the individual immigrants do with their lives after arriving. Do they open a restaurant or other business, do they provide for their family, do they integrate into the larger community - in essence, do they become proud Americans? Or do they try their hardest to stay "economic migrants" or "hyphenated-Americans"? Or, at worst, do they attempt to convert America into the countries from which they escaped?