Quotes About America

Power. The word fixed in my mother's mind like a curse. In America, it had generally remained hidden from view until you dug beneath the surface of things; until you visited an Indian reservation or spoke to a black person whose trust you had earned. But here power was undisguised, indiscriminate, naked, always fresh in the memory.

America will rise again. And hope will rise again.

America has not the option as to whether it will or it will not play a great part in the world," Roosevelt would argue. "It must play a great part. All that it can decide is whether it will play that part well or badly.

Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America — they will be met.

Glory and tragedy, courage and stupidity—one set of truths didn't negate the other. For war was contradiction, as was the history of America.

What makes us exceptional, what makes us America is our allegiance to an idea articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

I'm not yet ready to abandon the possibility of America—not just for the sake of future generations of Americans but for all of humankind.

A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide—a moving, tightly reasoned discussion of America's lackluster response to genocide and the need for stronger global leadership in preventing mass atrocities.

It was hard to tell how lasting these trends would be. I told myself it was the nature of democracies—including America's—to swing between periods of progressive change and conservative retrenchment.

Part of what's so powerful about this performance is it reminds us of the vital, crazy, kinetic energy that's at the heart of America--that people who have a vision and a set of ideals can transform the world., Every single step of progress that we've made has been based on this notion that people can come together, and ideas can move like electricity though them, and a world can change

That one trip gave me a glimpse of the dizzying freedom of the open road, how vast America was, and how full of wonder.

troubling of all, our democracy seems to be teetering on the brink of crisis—a crisis rooted in a fundamental contest between two opposing visions of what America is and what it should be; a crisis that has left the body politic divided, angry, and mistrustful, and has allowed for an ongoing breach of institutional norms, procedural safeguards, and the adherence to basic facts that both Republicans and Democrats once took for granted.

The Kennedys decided we're going to do an airlift. We're going to go out to Africa and we're going to start bringing young Africans over to this country and give them scholarships to study so that they can learn what a wonderful country America is. And this young man named Barack Obama got one of those tickets and came over to this country. Truth: His father came to America at least a year before this program started.

forty-two presidents.

For war was contradiction, as was the history of America.

But the idea of America, the promise of America: this I clung to with a stubbornness that surprised even me. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal"—that was my America. The America Tocqueville wrote about, the countryside of Whitman and Thoreau, with no person my inferior or my better; the America of pioneers heading west in search of a better life or immigrants landing on Ellis Island, propelled by a yearning for freedom.

Moreover, I believe that part of America's genius has always been its ability to absorb newcomers, to forge a national identity out of the disparate lot that arrived on our shores. In this we've been aided by a Constitution that--despite being marred by the original sin of slavery--has at its very core the ideas of equal citizenship under the laws; and an economic system that, more than any other, has offered opportunity to all comers, regardless of status or title or rank.

For most Americans, the basic bargain that made this country great has eroded … rooted in the nagging sense that no matter how hard they work, the deck is stacked against them. This kind of gaping inequality is the defining challenge of our time … and gives lie to the promise at the very heart of America: that this is the place where you can make it if you try

No matter who you are or what you look like, how you started off, or how and who you love, America is a place where you can write your own destiny.

Many of the veteran diplomats and experts they talked to were predictably skeptical of the need for any change to U.S. policy, arguing that as unsavory as some of our Arab allies might be, the status quo served America's core interests—something that wasn't guaranteed if more populist governments took their place.

It's embedded in founding documents that could simultaneously proclaim all men equal and yet count a slave as three-fifths of a man. It finds

It was the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, crafted by flawed but brilliant thinkers who reasoned their way to a system at once sturdy and capable of change. An America that could explain me.

I'd had a chance to meet many Dreamers, both before and after I entered the White House. They were smart, poised, and resilient—as full of potential as my own daughters. If anything, I found the Dreamers to be less cynical about America than many of their native-born contemporaries—precisely because their circumstances had taught them not to take life in this country for granted.

But I had my legs beneath me now and was convinced I was right, particularly on the more general principle that America shouldn't be afraid to engage its adversaries or push for diplomatic solutions to conflict.