Left and Right might like some of these:
The United States is like the guy at the party who gives cocaine to everybody, and still nobody likes him.
Americans always try to do the right thing after they’ve tried everything else.
America is a melting pot, the people at the bottom get burned while all the scum floats to the top.
America would be a nice place to live if Americans didn’t live there.- Anonymous
Of course, America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.
Here is the difference between Dante, Milton and me. They wrote about hell and never saw the place. I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years.
Look, we’re Americans: optimistic, addicted to the quick fix, constantly on the hunt for the new and exotic. It’s much easier for us to accept a guy with a big white beard hawking his own custom blend of saw palmetto and squirrel dandruff that it is to hear a real doctor telling us to lay off the Big Macs, and get off our fat asses and take a walk every decade or so.
The American male doesn’t mature until he has exhausted all other possibilities.- Wilfred Sheed
America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair.
America’s one of the finest countries anyone ever stole.
The trouble with America is that there are far too many wide-open spaces surrounded by teeth.
The thing that impresses me the most about America is the way parents obey their children.
America is a country that doesn’t know where it is going but is determined to set a speed record getting there.
In America any boy may become President, and I suppose that’s just the risk he takes.
It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence to never practice either of them.
The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced.
Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them.
New York now leads the world’s great cities in the number of people around whom you shouldn’t make a sudden move.
Americans will put up with anything provided it doesn’t block traffic.
Fall is my favorite season in Los Angeles, watching the birds change color and fall from the trees.
Their demeanor is invariably morose, sullen, clownish and repulsive. I should think there is not, on the face of the earth, a people so entirely destitute of humor, vivacity, or the capacity for enjoyment.
No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the great American public.
Everyone has a right to a university degree in America, even if it’s a PhD in Hamburger Technology.
The prostitute is the only honest woman left in America.
California is the only state in the union where you can fall asleep under a rose bush in full bloom and freeze to death.
If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent out Texas and live in Hell.
The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet.
When good Americans die, they go to Paris. When bad Americans die, they go to America.
California is a fine place to live if you happen to be an orange.
It was wonderful to find America, put perhaps it would have been more wonderful to miss it.
Never criticize Americans. They have the best taste that money can buy.
American is a very difficult language mixed with English.
America knows nothing of food, love, or art.
America is one long expectoration.
The American has no language, he has a dialect, slang, provincialism, accent, and so forth.
When you become used to never being alone, you may consider yourself Americanized.
There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.- G. K. Chesterton
No one can be as calculatedly rude as the British, which amazes Americans, who do not understand studied insult and can only offer abuse as a substitute.
Knavery seems to be so much the striking feature of its inhabitants that it may not in the end be an evil that they will become aliens to this country.
The organization of American society is an interlocking system of semi-monopolies notoriously venal, an electorate notoriously unenlightened, misled by a mass media notoriously phony.
Sir, they are a race of convicts and ought to be grateful for anything we allow them short of hanging.
Americans are people who laugh at African witch doctors and spend 100 million dollars on fake reducing systems.
There won’t be any revolution in America … the people are too clean. They spend all their time changing their shirts and washing themselves. You can’t feel fierce and revolutionary in a bathroom.
Eric Linklater
The trouble with America is that there are far too many wide open spaces surrounded by teeth.
The national dish of America is menus.
Frustrate a Frenchman, he will drink himself to death; an Irishman, he will die of angry hypertension; a Dane, he will shoot himself; an American, he will get drunk, shoot you, then establish a million dollar aid program for your relatives. Then he will die of an ulcer.- S. A. Rudin
New York is a city of 7,000,000 so decadent that when I leave it I never dare look back lest I turn into salt and the conductor throw me over his left shoulder for good luck.
I found there a country with thirty-two religions and only one sauce.
- Charles-Maurice Talleyrand-Perigord
America … just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.
America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail it knocks over a chair.
Speaking of New York as a traveler I have two faults to find with it. In the first place there is nothing to see; and in the second place there is no mode of getting about to see anything.
America … where laws and customs alike are based on the dreams of spinsters.
The Americans, like the English, probably make love worse than any other race.
In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors.- Bertrand Russell
Too many of us look upon Americans as dollar chasers. This is a cruel libel, even if it is reiterated thoughtlessly by the Americans themselves.
Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.- Gore Vidal
Americans are benevolently ignorant about Canada, while Canadians are malevolently well informed about the United States.
The hatred Americans have for their own government is pathological … at one level it is simply thwarted greed: since our religion is making a buck, giving a part of that buck to any government is an act against nature.
It is absurd to say that there are neither ruins nor curiosities in America when they have their mothers and their manners.
Question: If you find so much that is unworthy of reverence in the United States, why do you live here?
Mencken: Why do men go to zoos?
The American political system is like fast food - mushy, insipid, made out of disgusting parts of things and everybody wants some.
In America the President rules for four years and journalism governs for ever and ever.- Oscar Wilde
I heard an Englishman, who had been long resident in America, declare that in following, in meeting, or in overtaking, in the street, on the road, or in the field, at the theatre, the coffee-house, or at home, he had never overheard Americans conversing without the word DOLLAR being pronounced between them. Such unity of purpose … can … be found nowhere else, except… in an ant’s nest.
When good Americans die, they go to Paris; when bad Americans die, they go to America.
America is a land where a citizen will cross the ocean to fight for democracy - and won’t even cross the street to vote in a national election.
The Americans, like the English, probably make love worse than any other race.
The United States never lost a war or won a conference.
We don’t know what we want, but we are ready to bite somebody to get it.
-Will Rogers
What a pity, when Christopher Columbus discovered America, that he ever mentioned it.- Margot Asquith
What the country needs is dirtier fingernails and cleaner minds.
I pledge impertinence to the flag-waving of the un-indicted co-conspirators of America and the Republicans for which I can’t stand one abomination, underhanded fraud, indefensible with liberty and justice forget it!
- Bongo’s Pledge, Huge Book of Hell
