American Quotes

Part of show business is magic. You don't know how it happens.

I'd learned a lot in the Army. I knew that above all things in the world I had to become so big, so strong that people and their hatred could never touch me.

Reality is never as bad as a nightmare, as the mental tortures we inflict on ourselves.

I have to be a star like another man has to breathe.

The ultimate mystery is one's own self.

Bogart could have been color blind. He got to know a man before he decided if he liked him or not.

You always have two choices: your commitment versus your fear.

If you want to get known as a singer you hire five sexy chicks and let them fight over you onstage and for the cameras. That's publicity, man.

I had more clothes than I had closets, more cars than garage space, but no money.

Sober up, and you see and hear everything you'd been able to avoid hearing before.

A man is not complete until he has seen the baby he has made.

What have I got? No looks, no money, no education. Just talent.

Alcohol gives you infinite patience for stupidity.

The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or to say a new thing in an old way.

All through the night, like the tumult of a river when it races between the cliffs of a canyon, in my sleep I could hear the steady roar of the passing army.

You will find the poet who wrings the heart of the world, or the foremost captain of his time, driving a bargain or paring a potato, just as you would do.

You were only truly patriotic if you had a laborer for a grandfather and were glad of it.

We have grown used to money. The handling, the increase of it, is the chief business of life now with most of us.

We don't often look into these unpleasant details of our great struggle. We all prefer to think that every man who wore the blue or gray was a Philip Sidney at heart.

War may be an armed angel with a mission, but she has the personal habits of the slums.

TO preach a sermon or edit a newspaper were the two things in life which I always felt I could do with credit to myself and benefit to the world, if I only had the chance.

The only hero known to my childhood was Henry Clay.

The histories which we have of the great tragedy give no idea of the general wretchedness, the squalid misery, which entered into every individual life in the region given up to the war. Where the armies camped the destruction was absolute.

Sitting by the chimney corner as we grow old, the commonest things around us take on live meanings and hint at the difference between these driving times and the calm, slow moving days when we were young.

Reform is born of need, not pity.

Our young people have come to look upon war as a kind of beneficent deity, which not only adds to the national honor but uplifts a nation and develops patriotism and courage.

Our village was built on the Ohio River, and was a halting place on this great national road, then the only avenue of traffic between the South and the North.

North and South were equally confident that God was on their side, and appealed incessantly to Him.

No man surely has so short a memory as the American.

It was part of your religion to hate the British.