American Dream

Important American Dream Quotes

I have leaned this, at least, from my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
--Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854

Objects of the most stupendous magnitude, measures in which the lives and liberties of millions, born and unborn are most essentially interested, are now before us.
--John Adams, arguing for American independence, July 1, 1776

This progress by which the poor, honest, industrious, and resolute man raises himself, that he may work on his own account, and hire somebody else, is that improvement in condition that human nature is entitled to, is that improvement that is intended to be secured by those institutions under which we live, is the great principle for which this government was formed.
--Abe Lincoln September 17, 1859

For the Lord thy God bringeth thee into a good land. A land of wheat, and barley and vines, and fig trees and pomegranates; a land of oil olive and honey; A land wherein thou shalt eat bread without scarceness, thou shall not lack any thing in it; a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass.
--Deuteronomy 8:7-9, King James Bible, 1611

At its most compelling, California could be a moral premise, a prescription of what America could and should be. At its most trivial, it was a cluster of shallow dreams, venial hankerings which mistook laziness for leisure, selfishness for individualism, laxity for liberation, evasion and cheap escape for redemption and a solid second chance.
--Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 1973