American Quotes

America is becoming more and more dependent upon imports from foreign manufacturers than we are exports from our country in all fields: in appliances, in clothing, even food. This year America may become for the first time in its history a net food importer.

We have seen voters denied their rights in recent elections as they have been incorrectly purged from lists, their absentee votes not counted, and voting machine integrity and security not assured.

People are rapidly losing hope and trust. They believe their government has been captured by special interests and no longer cares about them, and they are right.

As I watch what is happening in the Middle East and the carnage that comes over our television screens every evening, I cannot help but ask myself, what is wrong with humankind that we cannot stop the killing?

A market where chief executive officers make 262 times that of the average worker and 821 times that of the minimum-wage worker is not a market that is working well. And it is surely not working well enough to build a solid middle class.

Architecture is politics.

What is design? It's where you stand with a foot in two worlds - the world of technology and the world of people and human purposes - and you try to bring the two together.

Inside every working anarchy, there's an Old Boy Network.

Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.

Well, I had a lot of help from my father with the soldering and so on, and he was very good at math and was fascinated with computers, and so I was fortunate enough to have a bunch of exposure going all the way back to high school - this was in the 1960s.

We've already gotten a significant grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and a university consortium. I think the whole sector of Foundations, potentially with government support, is promising - more than promising, I think, it's substantial.

The culmination of all of that was the decision to start a company, which became Lotus, to do a product, which became 1-2-3. By the time I reached that point it had been four years, and it felt like a lifetime, but really it was kind of evolutionary.

That's why it has to be a nonprofit, because a nonprofit is required to take monies it receives and use them for the purposes for which it's chartered by the government. It can't be pocketed.

No, my family is Russian, Georgian, via Ellis Island.

I was trying to figure out what to do next, I'd been accumulating ideas for productivity tools - software people could use every day, particularly to help organize their lives.

I actually built a tiny computer as a junior high school project.

Wherever you have weakening states and turmoil, you will have a fertile petri dish for terrorism.

When you talk about aiding this country against that country or about fighting terrorism, when you actually take that decision and strip it down, it always comes down to one person in the field giving specialized training to somebody else in the field.

What happened on September 11th is at least, theoretically, small stuff compared to what can happen.

What Americans can't face is that one of the reasons that the Russians and the Chinese were so impressed with us during the Cold War was the fact that Nixon and Kissinger went on bombing despite public reaction.

We talk a lot about individual rights, but in fact Americans are very willing to give up our individual rights if it means our property values will be protected, and so on.

The United States is not overdeployed or overextended with deployments in 150 countries on any given year. On any given week we have about 65 deployments.

The most important thing I learned as a foreign correspondent in about 80 countries is that it takes a very shallow knowledge of history to think that there are solutions to most problems.

The more dynamic the capitalistic expansion, the greater the disparity. It is from the disparity that we are going to get all the political upheaval for the next few years.

The Cold War went on for so long that it bred a kind of worldwide military establishment. Even when budgets went down in the early and mid-nineties, it didn't really affect it.

Terrorism can go anywhere where there is not strong government, or government that cannot control its hinterlands.

Media organizations are global. They may be based in the U.S., but they're essentially global.

It is development, not poverty, that causes upheaval and terrorism.

It is a cliche these days to observe that the United States now possesses a global empire - different from Britain's and Rome's but an empire nonetheless.

If you travel around America you see different sections of highways donated by this or that person, and that's a slow beginning of what may end up being a situation common in the Third World: some sections of highways in wealthy areas are beautifully maintained and other parts are just dirt-strewn p