Top 55 American Life Quotes

You probably know me as a producer for ‘This American Life’, a top podcast in iTunes.

My goal is to make as many films as possible about different aspects of American life.

The moral and social aspiration proper to American life is, of course, the aspiration vaguely described by the word democratic; and the actual achievement of the American nation points towards an adequate and fruitful definition of the democratic ideal.

I don’t think American life requires you to be on Facebook. It does require you to have access to the Internet.

When dealing with American politics, you try to follow the money, and that’s where it leads you. It doesn’t take you to the electoral college or to Princeton. It takes you down the darker alleys of American life.

The witty woman is a tragic figure in American life. Wit destroys eroticism and eroticism destroys wit, so women must choose between taking lovers and taking no prisoners.

The power of the American system of republicanism lies in its capacity to allow religious belief to be a competing, not a controlling, factor in American life.

I hate going to bed. I read scripts, clean, listen to the radio – I’ve fallen asleep to ‘This American Life’ more times than I can count!

Dad worked his entire career as an aviation technician. Mom was a legal secretary who became a teacher. We lived a simple American life.

It seems to me that the time for subtlety in our American life has passed.

Trump has seized the Republican nomination by finding scapegoats for the economic hardships and disintegrating lives of working-class whites while giving these voters a reassuring but false promise of their restoration to the center of American life.

This very individualistic form of Protestant Christianity that became so basic in English and then American life is to a large degree responsible for the historical success of Britain and America.

Like John Kennedy in 1960, Obama combines youth, vigor, and good looks with the promise of political change. Like Kennedy, he grew up in unusual circumstances that distance him from ordinary American life.

The Jews integrated themselves into American life to the point that the argument that the Jews aren’t American sounded so stupid, that people stopped thinking it.

The death of anti-gay hate speech is no doubt being hastened by the head-spinning speed with which gays as a group – to say nothing of gay marriage – are becoming an unremarkable and even quite traditional parts of American life.

I grew up in the American South and came of age in the 1960s, an incredibly turbulent time. It was as if the seams of American life were being ripped apart with riots and protests.

Through the 1980s and ’90s, evangelicals sought to turn back the forces of secularization. Groups like the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition pressed for laws recognizing Christianity’s unique place in American life, including laws that would allow prayer in public schools and Christian displays in public places.

Frank Capra, Hollywood’s Horatio Alger, lights with more cinematic know-how and zeal than any other director to convince movie audiences that American life is exactly like the ‘Saturday Evening Post’ covers of Norman Rockwell. ‘It’s A Wonderful Life,’ the latest example of Capracorn, shows his art at a hysterical pitch.

‘Hamilton’ and ‘Shuffle Along’ are closely connected because the ensembles are all friends, and they both deal with historical figures and the impact they’ve made on American life.

The death of JFK to the resignation of Richard Nixon marked a great turning point in American life.

Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.

When I was working on the unauthorized biography ‘Stan Musial: An American Life,’ which came out in 2011, old opponents recalled how Musial knew their names after they had been in the majors only a few days.

One of the most constant aspects of American life is change – and nowhere is it more evident than in our financial markets.

I think American life would be better without Twitter, and I think we’d have a better country if the president was not on Twitter. What people say in a bar or a pub doesn’t necessarily merit being memorialised.

A British director directed ‘American Beauty,’ an important film about American life, and it didn’t matter. What only mattered was everyone’s sensibility.

One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.

There is a paranoid streak in American life. Radio talk show hosts tend to foment that paranoid streak in American life.

The liberal left can be as rigid and destructive as any force in American life.

Deference has been codified in American life as political correctness. And political correctness functions like a despotic regime. It is an oppressiveness that spreads its edicts further and further into the crevices of everyday life.

I listen to ‘This American Life,’ ‘Serial,’ ‘S-Town,’ ‘Feast of Fun.’ I listened to ‘What’s the Tee?’ And that has really helped me throughout my entire drag career – podcasts have been a mainstay in my life as a drag artist.

To a generation beaten down by skyrocketing unemployment, plunging retirement savings, and mounting home foreclosures, ‘Mad Men’ offers the schadenfreude-filled message that their predecessors were equally unhappy – and that the bleakness meter in American life has always been set on high.

The American Legion has been a cornerstone of American life from the local to the federal level since the beginning, and serves as a constant reminder of the enormous contributions America’s armed service members have made to enrich our nation during and after their military service.

Over-reliance on strictly economic justifications has already begun to hurt the quality and range of education at every level of American life.

If there’s an enduring theme in my work, it’s probably the effects of class on American life.

Over the years, we settled into American life and embraced it fully. But having come from a different culture, I didn’t know the boundaries of American culture. Which is that, as a girl, you didn’t play football or soccer at lunch with the boys, and to be cool, you didn’t get into math Olympiad.

Together, Apple and Walmart represent the intense separation of American life into blue and red, rich and poor, overpriced and undersold, hyperconnected and left behind.

Evading military service has a long history in American life.

American art ought to be monumental, in keeping with American life.

I grew up in the South Pacific. Basically, my brothers were Guamanian. I spoke words of Guamanian long before I spoke words of English, and so I’ve seen a lot. You know, I’ve traveled in places where people don’t have the benefits of American life. And so I’ve seen a lot of stuff.

That’s one of the things about the Tea Party people. They think corporations have too much influence in American life and they do.

Unfettered, creative, and enthusiastic entrepreneurship is one of the hallmarks of American life, and it has allowed us to attract the best and brightest to this country.

It seems to be a law in American life that whatever enriches us anywhere except in the wallet inevitably becomes uneconomic.

Country music has become the music that best represents the reality of American life.

It’s one of these things that I’ve been struck by for so long about America. You know, this amazing politeness of American life that’s not at all class specific. It’s not like people get more polite as ascend the hierarchy of society. Just incredible good manners. It’s always been something that I’ve noticed.

Vietnam was the defining event for my generation. It spilled over into all facets of American life – into music, into the pulpits, in churches of our country. It spilled over into the city streets, police forces. And even if you were born late in the generation, Vietnam was still part of your childhood.

The search for happiness has long been a dominant feature of American life. It’s a byproduct of prosperity, not to mention the most famous line in the Declaration of Independence.

I got out of school in 2000, and I always wanted to be on ‘This American Life,’ since I first started telling stories. And that, I mean, that show is a little bit of a fortress. It’s really hard to get stuff on that show.

A lot of times when we work overseas we tend to put the experience of someone who lives overseas, a Chinese person or a Korean person or a Bosnian person, within the prism of an American life.

Year by year we are learning that in this restless, strenuous American life of ours vacations are essential.

Because of the terrorist threat, the FBI and CIA have become as important as the military in preserving our freedom. Yet while thanking our military is standard practice in American life, no one thinks of thanking the FBI, the CIA, or the rest of the intelligence community for keeping us safe since 9/11.

People are interested in pro football because it provides them with an emotional oasis; they don’t want football to get involved in the same types of court cases, racial problems and legislative issues they encounter in the rest of American life.