American Mind Quotes

In nothing is there more evolution than the American mind.

The individual comes face-to-face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists. The American mind has not come to a realisation of the evil which has been introduced into our midst. It rejects even the assumption that human creatures could espouse a philosophy which must ultimately destroy all that is good and decent.

Professional sports play a very important part in American life and a very important part in the American imagination. Anybody who goes to the movies these days sees just what an important part of the American mind sports comprise. If they are so important and have such a hold on the minds and imaginations of children, then this ought to be a focal point of our efforts.

Movies are one of the bad habits that have corrupted our century. They have slipped into the American mind more misinformation in one evening than the Dark Ages could muster in a decade.

I suppose there's a melancholy tone at the back of the American mind, a sense of something lost. And it's the lost world of Thomas Jefferson. It is the lost sense of innocence that we could live with a very minimal state, with a vast sense of space in which to work out freedom.

It is an enormous simplification to speak of the American mind. Every American has his own mind. It is absurd to ascribe any achievements and virtues or any misdeeds and vices of individual Americans to America as such.... What makes the American people different from any other people is the joint effect produced by the thoughts and actions of innumerable uncommon Americans.

The suggestion that Negroes should be treated as equals to white men woke some of the deepest and ugliest fears in the American mind

… we are on the brink of ruin. I am distressed to see the minions of a tyrant more devoted to his will than we are to a cause in which the whole world is interested. New measures and new men alone can save us. The American mind cannot long support the present complexion of affairs. Let our army be reformed. Let our general officers be chosen annually. The breaking of 40 regiments, and the dismissal of one field officer from every regiment & of one subaltern from every company will save many millions to the continent. Your army by these means may be made respectable & useful. But you must not expect to fill it with soldiers for 3 years, or during the war. The genius of America rebels against the scheme. Good General Officers would make an army of six months men an army of heroes.

It is a peculiarity of the American mind that it regards any excursion into the truth as an adventure into cynicism.

The movies are one of the bad habits that corrupted our century.Of their many sins, I offer as the worst their effect on the intellectual side of the nation. It is chiefly from that viewpoint I write of them - as an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming a cultured people.

Let it be immediately added, however, that this economic independence and prosperity has always been absolutely associated in the American mind with free political institutions.

The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background.

In the arsenal of the phony, the politics of God is one of the deadliest punches to the sweet spot of the American mind.

When forced, therefore, to resort to arms for redress, an appeal to the tribunal of the world was deemed proper for our justification. This was the object of the Declaration of Independence. Not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject; in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we were compelled to take, neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.

Time has lost all meaning in that nightmare alley of the Western world known as the American mind.

The American mind, unlike the English, is not formed by books, but, as Carl Sandburg once said to me... by newspapers and the Bible.