The Yankee is one who, if he once gets his teeth set on a thing, all creation can't make him let go.

A rigid America is also weak and vulnerable, because it sacrifices its unique strength: the energy of people who think they can always make something new of their lives.

America is so vast that almost everything said about it is likely to be true, and the opposite is probably equally true.

"I'm glad I'm American," she said. "Here in Italy I feel that everybody's dead. Carthaginians and old Romans and Moorish pirates and medieval princes with poisoned rings.

There was even a recurrent idea in America about an education that would leave out history and the past, that should be a sort of equipment for aerial adventure, weighed down by none of the stowaways of inheritance or tradition.

So much of learning to be an American is learning not to let your individuality become a nuisance.

In the modern world, we Americans are the old inhabitants. We first had political freedom, high industrial production, an economy of abundance.

There is a familiar America. It is celebrated in speeches and advertised on television and in the magazines. It has the highest mass standard of living the world has ever known.

Our affluent society contains those of talent and insight who are driven to prefer poverty, to choose it, rather than to submit to the desolation of an empty abundance.

Thou, O my country, hast thy foolish ways, Too apt to purr at every stranger's praise!