Quotes About America

I asked myself what did Adam know of paradise? said the sheik, who told us to call him Hamid. He woke up one day and found himself in the Holy Garden and he had never known anything else. That's what I think has happened to America. You are a young people. What have you known but the paradise of peace and security and wealth?

Another time, he was playing [chess] with his equal, the Duchess of Bourbon, who made a move that inadvertently exposed her king. Ignoring the rules of the game, he promptly captured it. Ah, said the duchess, we do not take Kings so. Replied Franklin in a famous quip: We do in America.

America's most dangerous internal threat, he felt, came not from communist subversives but from those who used the fear of communists to trample civil liberties. "America is incomparably less endangered by its own Communists than by the hysterical hunt for the few Communists that are here," he told the socialist leader Norman Thomas.

was the result of government policies, carefully crafted in a thoughtful and bipartisan atmosphere, that assured America's lead in building an information-age economy. The most influential person in this process, which may come as a surprise to those who know of his role only as a punch line to jokes, was Senator Al Gore Jr. of Tennessee.

As Claude-Anne Lopez notes, "In colonial America it was sinful to look idle, in France it was vulgar to look busy.

Se dio cuenta, una vez más, de que Estados Unidos, pese a sus muestras de mal gusto y sus excesos de entusiasmo, le ofrecía libertades que puede que ya no encontrara en Europa.

As Franklin repeatedly stressed in his letters to his son, America should not replicate the rigid ruling hierarchies of the Old World, the aristocratic structures and feudal social orders based on birth rather than merit. Instead, its strength would be its creation of a proud middling people, a class of frugal and industrious shopkeepers and tradesmen who were assertive of their rights and proud of their status.

James was the first great fighter for an independent press in America, and he was the most important journalistic influence on his younger brother. He

The great German philosopher Immanuel Kant called him the "new Prometheus" for stealing the fire of heaven. He quickly became not only the most celebrated scientist in America and Europe, but also a popular hero. In solving one of the universe's greatest mysteries, he had conquered one of nature's most terrifying dangers.

The resulting four-page paper, published in May 1935 and known by the initials of its authors as the EPR paper, was the most important paper Einstein would write after moving to America. "Can the Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Regarded as Complete?" they asked in their title.

On the other hand, he stressed in scores of letters and statements that Americans should not let the fear of communism cause them to surrender the civil liberties and freedom of thought that they cherished. There were a lot of domestic communists in England, but the people there did not get themselves whipped into a frenzy by internal security investigations, he pointed out. Americans need not either.

As a publishing magnate and then as a postmaster, he was one of the few to view America as a whole. To him, the colonies were not merely disparate entities. They were a new world with common interests and ideals.

that this will be for the good of both nations," he said, giving a royal imprimatur to America's status as an independent nation.

I was living out the dream of emancipation—a free man in America, desperate for someone to rein me in.

Nothing could ever replace the treasure of America's men and women killed or forever maimed by Japan's attack, but Nimitz looked around Pearl Harbor and decided that it could have been much worse. On the list of physical casualties, there were three glaring omissions that would prove to be major strategic blunders on the part of the Japanese.

My wealth has come from a combination of living in America, some lucky genes, and compound interest.

For 240 years, it's been a terrible mistake to bet against America.

Parents often complain that America's education establishment abuses the classroom and misuses their children by preaching new moral orthodoxies on a whole range of issues like gender identity. The courts and legal profession then enforce those new orthodoxies. But it's the social sciences that actually help create them.

America is daily attacked for cowboy interventionism and arrogant unilateralism--then simultaneously attacked for not acting unilaterally to cleanse the planet of all tyranny.

Religion--invaluable in America's founding, forming and flowering--deserves a place in the schools. Indeed, it had that place for almost 200 years. A healthy country would teach its children evolution--and the Ten Commandments.

For the Europeans there really is a peace dividend, because we provide the peace. They can afford social democracy without the capacity to defend themselves because they can always depend on the United States. So why not us as well? Because what for Europe is decadence--decline, in both comfort and relative safety--is for us mere denial. Europe can eat, drink and be merry for America protects her. But for America it's different. If we choose the life of ease, who stands guard for us?

Historically, multilateralism is a way for weak countries to multiply their power by attaching themselves to stronger ones. But multilateralism imposed on Great Powers, and particularly on a unipolar power, is intended to restrain that power. Which is precisely why France is an ardent multilateralist. But why should America be?

America is the land mine between barbarism and civilization.

America is the most welcoming, religiously tolerant, philo-semitic country in the world. No nation since Cyrus the Great's Persia has done more for the Jews.