AMERICA QUOTES III
quotations about America
It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union. And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people -- women as well as men.
SUSAN B. ANTHONY
speech after her arrest for voting in the 1872 presidential election
The English Constitution, in a word, is framed on the principle of choosing a single sovereign authority, and making it good; the American, upon the principle of having many sovereign authorities, and hoping that their multitude may atone for their inferiority.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
Never content just to be, America is also obliged to mean; America signifies, hence its constant and riveting vulnerability to illusion.
MARTIN AMIS
"Phantom of the Opera: The Republicans in 1988", Visiting Mr. Nabokov and Other Excursions
We speak with pride and admiration of that little band of Americans who overcame insuperable odds to set this nation on course 200 years ago. But our glory didn't end with them. Americans ever since have emulated their deeds.
RONALD REAGAN
State of the Union address, Jan. 26, 1982
I have fallen in love with American names,
The sharp, gaunt names that never get fat,
The snakeskin-titles of mining-claims,
The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat,
Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.
STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT
"American Names"
Surely they knew that the very idea of the future came in an American box -- complete with instructions for assembling a Constitution, a MacDonald's hamburger franchise, a row of Marriot hotels and a First Amendment.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
Money and Class in America
Look, America is no more a democracy than Russia is a Communist state. The governments of the U.S. and Russia are practically the same. There's only a difference of degree. We both have the same basic form of government: economic totalitarianism. In other words, the settlement to all questions, the solutions to all issues are determined not by what will make the people most healthy and happy in their bodies and their minds but by economics. Dollars or rubles.
TOM ROBBINS
Another Roadside Attraction
America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity. She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights. She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right. Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet on her brows would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world; she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.... Her glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind.
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
address to U.S. House of Representatives, Jul. 4, 1821
France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter--it was the graves at Shiloh and the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, and the country boys dying in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
"The Swimmers", Saturday Evening Post, Oct. 19, 1929
I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence, for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.
JOHN ADAMS
Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law, Boston Gazette, Aug. 1765
To be black in America is to walk with fury.
NATHAN MCCALL
To Be Black in America Is to Walk with Fury
Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.
GORE VIDAL
Screening History
The English Puritans pulled down church and state to rebuild Zion on the ruins, and all the while it was not Zion, but America, they were building.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
"New England Two Centuries Ago", The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose
The truth is, everything we know about America, everything Americans come to know about being American, isn't from the news. I live there. We don't go home at the end of the day and think, "Well, I really know who I am now because the Wall Street Journal says that the Stock Exchange closed at this many points." What we know about how to be who we are comes from stories. It comes from the novels, the movies, the fashion magazines. It comes from popular culture.
CHRIS ABANI
"Chris Abani on the stories of Africa", TED conference
This is America and I'll make as much noise as I want so just shut your own mouth.
GARRISON KEILLOR
Liberty: A Novel of Lake Wobegon
Deep in the heart of every American, I think there burns a flame. It's an inheritance from every generation of Americans that has come before us. That's why we have overcome every crisis we have ever faced before. It's what makes this nation so special, why we stand apart. That flame is not going to be extinguished in this moment. If our leadership does its part, the American people will do more than their part.
JOE BIDEN
speech on Coronavirus, March 23, 2020
I feel most at home in the United States, not because it is intrinsically a more interesting country, but because no one really belongs there any more than I do. We are all there together in its wholly excellent vacuum.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
"The Case Against Roots", America and Cosmic Man
It was from America that the plain ideas that men ought to mind their business, and that the nation is responsible to Heaven for the acts of the State -- ideas long locked in the breast of solitary thinkers, and hidden among Latin folios -- burst forth like a conqueror upon the world they were destined to transform, under the title of the Rights of Man ... and the principle gained ground, that a nation can never abandon its fate to an authority it cannot control.
LORD ACTON
The History of Freedom in Antiquity
The chief business of the American people is business.
CALVIN COOLIDGE
speech, Jan. 17, 1925
What joins the Americans one to another is not a common ancestry, language or race, but a shared work of the imagination that looks forward to the making of a future, not backward to the insignia of the past. Their enterprise is underwritten by a Constitution that allows for the widest horizons of sight and the broadest range of expression, supports the liberties of the people as opposed to the ambitions of the state, and stands as premise for a narrative rather than plan for an invasion or a monument. The narrative was always plural; not one story, many stories.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
"Them", Lapham's Quarterly: Foreigners, winter 2014