American character Quote by Eric Liu

Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions,…

— James A. Baldwin

The ability of Americans to toss off oppressive characters is the most rewarding aspect, to me, of U.S. history.

— Norman Corwin

Unity and resistance is a strong American trait.

— Tom Morello

“Americans have many admirable characteristics, but literary taste is rare among them.”

— Elizabeth Peters

Nothing can be more notorious than the calumnies and invectives with which the wisest measures and most virtuous characters of The United States have…

— Thurgood Marshall

Here is one of the fundamental defects of American fiction--perhaps the one character that sets it off sharply from all other known kinds of…

— H. L. Mencken

...America has enjoyed the doubtful blessing of a single-track mind. We are able to accommodate, at a time, only one national hero; and we…

— Ellen Glasgow

Remarkable trait in the American Character is the union, not very infrequent, of Yankee cleverness with spiritualism.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

America is proud of what it does to its writers, the way it breaks and bedevils them, rendering them deluded or drunken or dead…

— Martin Amis

The American character looks always as if it had just had a rather bad haircut, which gives it, in our eyes at any rate,…

— Mary McCarthy

We often pride ourselves on even the most criminal passions, but envy is a timid and shamefaced passion we never dare to acknowledge.

— Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Cynicism and naivety lie cheek by jowl in the American imagination; if the United States is one of the most venal nations on Earth,…

— Terry Eagleton