Characteristics, National

Characteristics, National

 
  1. America is more a ratatouille than a melting pot —Ken Holm, New York Times Magazine, October 12, 1986

    The food image is particularly appropriate to Holm’s article about mixing Eastern and Western ingredients when cooking.

  2. America is rather like life. You can usually find in it what you look for —E. M. Forster
  3. As American as a catcher’s mit —George Jean Nathan
  4. As American as a Norman Rockwell painting —Max Shulman
  5. As American as a sawed-off shotgun —Dorothy Parker about Dashiell Hammett, New Yorker, April 15, 1931
  6. As American as cheesecake —Samuel Yellen
  7. As American as corn on the cob —Anon
  8. As American as jazz —Anon
  9. As American as shopping malls —Anon
  10. As American as the dream of being a millionaire —Anon
  11. As American as the two-car garage —Anon
  12. As British as roast beef —Anon
  13. As English as tea and scones —Elyse Sommer

    The variations to this are virtually limitless; to cite just a few: “As English as the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace,” “English as clotted cream,” “As English as Picadilly,” “As English as Trafalgar Square.”

  14. As in sex, the Japanese do not care for extended encounters: “in and out” is their motto in love and war —James Kirkup
  15. Bullied and ordered about, the Englishman obeys like a sheep, evades like a knave, or tries to murder his oppressor —George Bernard Shaw
  16. Countries are like fruit; the worms are always inside —Jean Giradoux
  17. Energy in a nation is like sap in a tree, it rises from the bottom up —Woodrow Wilson, October 28, 1912 speech
  18. Frenchmen are like grains of gunpowder, each by itself smutty and contemptible, but mass them together and they are terrible indeed —Samuel Taylor Coleridge
  19. A French woman dips into love like a duck into water,’tis but a shake of the feathers and wag of the tail and all is well again; but an English woman is like a heedless swan venturing into a pool who gets drowned —Washington Irving
  20. Friendship in France as impossible to be attained as orange-trees on the mountains of Scotland —Lady Mary Wortley Montague letter to Lady Pomfret, July 12, 1744
  21. (In America … people claim and disown ‘identities’) as easily as they slap on bumper stickers —Philip Roth
  22. Nations, like individuals, have to limit their objectives or take the consequences —James Reston
  23. Nations, like men, die by imperceptible disorders —Jean Giraudoux
  24. Nations, like men, have their infancy —Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke
  25. A quiet Irishman is about as harmless as a powder magazine built over a match factory —James Dunne
  26. Soviet action is like a riddle wrapped inside an enigma —Winston Churchill
  27. The wheels of American foreign relations turn like the wheels of an ox cart —Clive Cussler

    See Also: POLITICS