American Quotes

The most painful moral struggles are not those between good and evil, but between the good and the lesser good.

I refuse to believe that trading recipes is silly. Tuna Fish casserole is at least as real as corporate stock.

Fantasies are more than substitutes for unpleasant reality; they are also dress rehearsals, plans. All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.

Desire creates its own object.

Beware of people carrying ideas. Beware of ideas carrying people.

Belief in the absence of illusions is itself an illusion.

True revolutionaries are like God - they create the world in their own image. Our awesome responsibility to ourselves, to our children, and to the future is to create ourselves in the image of goodness, because the future depends on the nobility of our imaginings.

Kindness and intelligence don't always deliver us from the pitfalls and traps: there are always failures of love, of will, of imagination. There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships.

There are no original ideas. There are only original people.

Our awesome responsibility to ourselves, to our children, and to the future is to create ourselves in the image of goodness, because the future depends on the nobility of our imaginings.

I wish that my husband's friends had left him where he is, happy and contented in retirement.

When the ambassadors of other foreign countries come to Japan to make treaties, they can be told that such and such a treaty has been made with the ambassador of the United States, and they will rest satisfied with this.

We were sent to this country by the President, who desires to promote the welfare of Japan, and are quite different from the ambassadors of other countries.

We do not wish to open your ports to foreign trade all at once.

Two things are desired in order that intercourse may be had: First, that a minister or agent be allowed to reside at the capital. Second, that commerce between different countries be freely allowed.

The United States have no possessions in the east and do not desire to have any, as other countries do.

The President wishes the Japanese to be very prudent about the introduction of opium, and if a treaty is made, he wishes that opium may be strictly prohibited.

The President of the United States thinks that for the Japanese opium is more dangerous than war.

The President is of opinion that if Japan makes a treaty with the United States, all other foreign countries will make the same kind of a treaty, and Japan will be safe thereafter.

The nations of the West hope that by means of steam communication all the world will become as one family.

The expense of a war could be paid in time; but the expense of opium, when once the habit is formed, will only increase with time.

Since the invention of steamships distant countries have become like those that are near at hand.

Japan and China are isolated and without intercourse with other countries; hence the President directed me to attend to or watch the state of affairs in China also.

It will be quite satisfactory if you open them gradually, as the circumstances may require; but the President assures you that this will not be the case if you make a treaty with England first.

It appears that the English think the Japanese... are fond of opium, and they want to bring it here also.

In time of war steamships and improved arms are the most important things.

In case of war, a treaty would have to be made at the end of the war.

If you make a treaty first with the United States and settle the matter of the opium trade, England cannot change this, though she should desire to do so.

If war should break out between England and Japan, the latter would suffer much more than the former.

If Japan had been near to either England or France, war would have broken out long ago.