The Craziness, Diversity, and Messiness of Americans: 16 Quotes

Parade float by a heating and cooling company in the Farmington Founders Festival parade, July 18, 2026

I’m continuing to share some quotes about America and Americans. This week, my focus is on our messy diversity — how loud, raucous, contradictory, vibrant, and often completely crazy we are (for better or for worse). Almost every time I go somewhere there are lots of people, I am reminded of this.

These 16 quotes, from both fiction and nonfiction, speeches and essays and novels, speak to this aspect of my country and my home.

What America is, to me, is a guy doesn’t want to buy, you let him not buy, you respect his not buying. A guy has a crazy notion different from your crazy notion, you pat him on the back and say, Hey pal, nice crazy notion, let’s go have a beer. America, to me, should be shouting all the time, a bunch of shouting voices, most of them wrong, some of them nuts, but please, not just one droning glamorous reasonable voice.

— George Saunders, In Persuasion Nation

I am someone who represents a very complex country which insists on being simple-minded. And simplicity, it occurs to me, it has occurred to me more than once, in my somewhat stormy life, simplicity is taken to be a great American virtue, along with sincerity…. And as long as you’re sincere in what you say, you haven’t got to know what you’re talking about. These are the American virtues — two of them anyway. One of the results of this is that immaturity is taken to be a virtue too.

— James Baldwin

American human beings are a slippery and protean bunch in real life, hard as hell to get any kind of universal handle on.

— David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

America, like England and Scotland, had never really been a gay nation. Rather it had been heavily and noisily jocular, with a substratum of worry and insecurity, in the image of its patron saint, Lincoln of the rollicking stories and the tragic heart. But at least there had been hearty greetings, man to man; there had been clamorous jazz for dancing, and the lively, slangy catcalls of young people, and the nervous blatting of tremendous traffic.

— Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here

He is convinced — and what immigrant isn’t? — that all Americans are crazy.

— Sigrid Nunez, A Feather on the Breath of God

Being American was like getting a good shellacking — whatever that meant. He’d heard it, and it sounded right for how he was feeling. These people did things all day long. They were frantic. They ate lunch in their cars and never had a siesta. They even went to church in their cars. Or on their TVs.

— Luis Alberto Urrea, The House of Broken Angels

And this country has lost what has made it magic, of course. The exuberance, you know. Things, I am afraid, are soon to fall apart. The center cannot hold, all that.

— Lauren Groff, Arcadia

History often teaches us to embrace ambiguity, to understand there aren’t simple answers to complex questions, and Americans tend to like simple answers to complex questions. So the challenge is to use history to help the public feel comfortable with nuance and complexity.

— Lonnie G. Bunch III

Americans are a confused people because they can’t admit this contradiction. They believe in a universe of divine justice where the human race is guilty of sin, but they also believe in a secular justice where human beings are presumed innocent. You can’t have both. You know how Americans deal with it? They pretend they are eternally innocent no matter how many times they lose their innocence.

— Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

Wouldn’t the crow, that ubiquitous trickster, make a more compelling and accurate national symbol for the United States than the bald eagle?

— Sherman Alexie, War Dances

Before I met Lisette, America wasn’t what I’d imagined; it’s only natural, I expect. Everyone was friendly, but bafflingly so, as though each person had a series of invisible hedges around them that I didn’t know how to penetrate.

— Te-Ping Chen, Land of Big Numbers

In the portrait of Jefferson that hangs

at Monticello, he is rendered two-toned:

his forehead white with illumination —

a lit bulb — the rest of his face in shadow,

darkened as if the artist meant to contrast

his bright knowledge, its dark subtext.

— Natasha Trethewey, Monument: Poems New and Selected

Like many great works of theater, I believe America is simultaneously a riotous comedy and a heartbreaking tragedy. Our hamartia, our fatal flaw, is racism. It haunts us every day.

— Wajahat Ali, Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American

Matthew spoke forcefully and to the point. He reminded them that they were men and women; that they were free, white and twenty-one; that they were citizens of the United States; that America was their country as well as Rockefeller’s; that they must stand firm in the defense of their rights as working people; that the worker was worthy of his hire; that nothing should be dearer to them than the maintenance of white supremacy. He insinuated that even in their midst there probably were some Negroes who had been turned white by Black-No-More. Such individuals, he insisted made poor union material because they always showed their Negro characteristics and ran away in a crisis. Ending with a fervent plea for liberty, justice and a square deal, he sat down amid tumultuous applause.

— George S. Schuyler, Black No More

Why was America so kind and yet so cruel? Was there no way to simplifying things in this continent so that suffering would be minimized? Was there no common denominator on which we could all meet?

— Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart: A Personal History

If I could be brave enough and live long enough I could crawl inside the life of every man, woman and child in America. After I had gone within them I could be born out of them. I could become something the like of which has never been seen before. We would see then what America is like.

— Sherwood Anderson, A New Testament