American Dream Quotes

“John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
― Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress

“Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas ... with the music at top volume and at least a pint of ether.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

“And when I speak, I don't speak as a Democrat. Or a Republican. Nor an American. I speak as a victim of America's so-called democracy. You and I have never seen democracy - all we've seen is hypocrisy. When we open our eyes today and look around America, we see America not through the eyes of someone who has enjoyed the fruits of Americanism. We see America through the eyes of someone who has been the victim of Americanism. We don't see any American dream. We've experienced only the American nightmare.”
― Malcolm X

“If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire.”
― George Monbiot

“You're just another american who is willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick being shoved up your asshole every day... The owners of this country know the truth... it's called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it!”
― George Carlin

“The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“I've always resented the smug statements of politicians, media commentators, corporate executives who talked of how, in America, if you worked hard you would become rich. The meaning of that was if you were poor it was because you hadn't worked hard enough. I knew this was a lie, about my father and millions of others, men and women who worked harder than anyone, harder than financiers and politicians, harder than anybody if you accept that when you work at an unpleasant job that makes it very hard work indeed.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“People are continually pointing out to me the wretchedness of white people in order to console me for the wretchedness of blacks. But an itemized account of the American failure does not console me and it should not console anyone else. That hundreds of thousands of white people are living, in effect, no better than the "niggers" is not a fact to be regarded with complacency. The social and moral bankruptcy suggested by this fact is of the bitterest, most terrifying kind.”
― James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name

“Many years ago I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for that dream during the Second World War, when there was no peace.

But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts us absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many lifeless bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Dat's what they say of this cauntry back home, Kath: 'America, the land of milk and honey.' Bot they never tell you the milk's gone sour and the honey's stolen.”
― Andre Dubus III, House of Sand and Fog

“I guess it could be said that the inspiration for 'Requiem for a Dream' is watching the American dream not only destroy so many lives in the U.S., but infect the rest of the world with its obsession with getting more, ignoring the deadly effect that has on the planet.”
― Hubert Selby Jr

“I say, I can not identify that thing which is called happiness, that thing whose token is a laugh, or a smile, or a silent serenity on the lip. I may have been happy, but it is not in my conscious memory now. Nor do I feel a longing for it, as though I had never had it; my spirit seeks different food from happiness, for I think I have a suspicion of what it is. I have suffered wretchedness, but not because of the absence of happiness, and without praying for happiness. I pray for peace -- for motionlessness -- for the feeling of myself, as of some plant, absorbing life without seeking it, and existing without individual sensation. I feel that there can be no perfect peace in individualness. Therefore, I hope one day to feel myself drank up into the pervading spirit animating all things. I feel I am an exile here. I still go straying.”
― Herman Melville, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities

“I live in a house over there on the Island, and in that house there is a man waiting for me. When he drove up at the door I drove out of the dock because he says I’m his ideal.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Winter Dreams

“...all these things were part of the business of dreams. He had learned not to laugh at the advertisements offering to teach writing, cartooning, engineering, to add inches to the biceps and to develop the bust”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts / A Cool Million

“Harry had worked his way through the American Dream and come to the conclusion that is was composed of a good lunch and a deep red wine that could soar.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“The disruption of the anticipated American future that was simply to have unrolled out of the solid American past, out of each generation’s getting smartersmarter for knowing the inadequacies and limitations of the generations beforeout of each new generation’s breaking away from the parochialism a little further, out of the desire to go the limit in America with your rights, forming yourself as an ideal person who gets rid of the traditional Jewish habits and attitudes, who frees himself of the pre-America insecurities and the old, constraining obsessions so as to live unapologetically as an equal among equals.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946. We were both war heroes, and both of us had just been elected to Congress.”
― Norman Mailer

“He was going to get the American Dream that even Americans dream about.”
― Nicola Yoon, The Sun Is Also a Star

“I said to him, "Krystal, to walk away you gotta leave something behind. I'll marry you on the condition that a wig never touch your head again." He agreed and we've been inseparable ever since. And we'll continue to be. Right, Yitzhak?”
― John Cameron Mitchell, Hedwig and the Angry Inch

“I do not believe in the American Dream, but I believe in American daydreams. The American Dream keeps you working for a future that never comes built on a past that never happened. It is not so much a dream as a value judgement. A pretense of patriotism at a price few can pay and at a cost few can bear. But daydreams don't carry that burden, daydreams are a protected realm free from expectation. They soften things that are hard and bad letting you imagine a past that went better than it did and a future that could go better than it will. Day dreams are private and pointless. No one expects day dreams to come true yet sometimes to one's joyous surprise, they do.”
― Sarah Kendzior, The Last American Road Trip: A Memoir

“That’s the big trouble with our whole school system in this country. The kids are all educated to live a kind of life that they may never have a chance to live. A kid in the slums goes to school and is taught all about how to be President of the United States and he’s told that’s what he should try to be, when the fact is he will be darn lucky if he ever gets to be a truck driver. You know how mixed up our school system is.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals

“The American dream was wrought in the fire of the passionate hearts and minds of America’s radicals. It could never have been conceived in the cold, clammy tomb of conservativism. The American radical descends from those who begot, nurtured, fought, and suffered for every idea that moved men’s feet forward in the march of civilization — the radicals of the world. The hopes and aspirations of the radicals of the world found fruit in the American Revolution. Here in the New World man would find the new life, the new order; even our money carried this message, NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM.

The history of America is the story of America’s radicals. It is a saga of revolution, battle, words on paper setting hearts on fire, ferment and turmoil; it is the story of every rallying cry of the American people. It is the story of the American Revolution, of the public schools, of the battle for free land, of emancipation, of the unceasing struggle for the ever increasing liberation of mankind.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals

“The job ahead is clear. Every conceivable effort must be made to rekindle the fire of democracy while a few embers yet glow in the gray ashes of the American dream. Once it goes out it may take generations before a new fire can be started. The fire, the energy, and the life of democracy is popular pressure. Democracy itself is a government constantly responding to continuous pressures of its people. The only hope for democracy is that more people and more groups will become articulate and exert pressure upon their government. It is short-sighted to attack the few major pressure groups in this country as “dangerous lobbyists” or “un-American,” for although these pressure blocs are seeking primarily to further their own interests, their organizing and bringing pressures to bear upon the government is participation and democratic activity which is infinitely more American, more democratic than the dry, dead rot of inactivity, of refusing to become involved in pressure groups. When we talk of democratic citizenship we talk and think in terms of an informed, active, participating, interested people — an interested and participating people is popular pressure!”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals

“I heard this once:

When the immigrants came to America, they thought the streets would be paved with gold. But when they got here, they realized three things:

1. The streets were not paved with gold.
2. The streets were not paved at all.
3. They were the ones expected to do the paving.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“At the end of the century, fascism leaves no lasting mark on thousand year old civilizations, it's only the adolescent countries like the US that get wiped out of existence.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sonnets From The Mountaintop

“America is The Warning (Sonnet)

Finally America has fallen,
it's a great day for the human race,
now that the american dream is infected,
it's a golden occasion for earth upliftment.

Uncle Sam has contracted something nasty,
nothing surprising, it's long time coming;
the time has never been more immaculate,
for actual human cultures and civilizations
to dream beyond the monkeys of silicon valley.

It's a golden age of decolonization,
time to rescue your mind from the parasites;
it's time for great rejoicing, now that
the land of plague has lost its marbles -
fall of America is a blessing for humankind.

West never had culture to begin with,
neither Washington nor Rome or Buck House -
when parasites bury themselves in castles,
light of the human engulf the world around.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sonnets From The Mountaintop

“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“An American Prayer (Divine Comedy, Sonnet)

The other day I was having a chat with God,
she was telling me about the prayers flooding
in from America, all claiming extreme religiousness:

let our wall stand bold and tall,
fighting off all indigenous impurities,
let us paint it pitch black,
so it's too hot to be climbed by the savages;

now let us deport every last trace of sense,
let us deport all who defy our holy faith -
let us ban all blacks, whites, muslims alike,
whoever talks the nonsense of tolerance.

Then the Holy Mother sighed in despair, and said,
"and to think they are doing all that in my name!"
So I paused for a moment, then I grinned -
why not grant their wishes, then flood the entire Eden!”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sonnets From The Mountaintop

“If anyone can testify credibly to the decline of the American dream, it is the white-collar unemployed—the people who “played by the rules,” “did everything right,” and still ended up in ruin.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream