Oscar Wilde quotes about America

1) "America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up."

2) "America has never quite forgiven Europe for having been discovered somewhat earlier in history than itself."

3) "America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilisation in between."

4) "In America the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience."

5) “When good Americans die, they go to Paris." "Where do bad Americans go?" "They stay in America”  

6) "I was very much disappointed in the Atlantic Ocean."

7) "She behaves as if she was beautiful. Most American women do. It is the secret of their charm." 

8) "The youth of America is their oldest tradition. It has been going on now for three hundred years."

9) "I don't think I should like America." "I suppose because we have no ruins and no curiosities," said Virginia satirically. "No ruins! no curiosities!" answered the Ghost; "you have your navy and your manners."

10) "We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language."

11) "In America the President reigns for four years, and journalism governs for ever and ever."

12) "Walt Whitman and Emerson are the poets who have given the world more than anyone else. Perhaps Whitman is not so widely read in England, but England never appreciates a poet until he is dead."

13) "The beautiful, passionate, ruined South, the land of magnolias and music, of roses and romance . . . living on the memory of crushing defeats"

14) "Everybody in American seems in a rush to catch a train."

15) "The first thing that struck me on landing in America was that if the Americans are not the most well-dressed people in the world, they are the most comfortably dressed."

16) "America is the noisiest country that ever existed. One is waked up in the morning, not by the singing of the nightingale, but by the steam whistle."

17) "In one dancing saloon I saw the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across. Over the piano was printed a notice: 'Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.'"

18) “Every American Bride is taken there, and the sight of that tremendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life.” (on Niagara Falls) 

19) “I wonder that no criminal has ever pleaded the ugliness of your city as an excuse for his crimes.” (on Cincinnati) 

20) "America is not a country, it is a world."