Quotes About America

So ran the line from the polemics of Edward Alfred Pollard to the politics of George Corley Wallace—a line connecting the Civil War to the Cold War, the 1860s to the 1960s, a distant America to the contemporary one. The federal government was the villain. States' rights were the salvation of the Founders' vision. White supremacy was to be protected

The great good news about America—the American gospel, if you will—is that religion shapes the life of the nation without strangling it.

It's tempting to romanticize the words King spoke before the Lincoln Memorial. To do so, however, cheapens the courage of the nonviolent soldiers of freedom who faced—and too often paid—the ultimate price for daring America to live up to the implications of the Declaration of Independence and become a country in which liberty was innate and universal, not particular to station, creed, or color.

The founding religion—at least in the Declaration—was based more on a religion of reason than of revelation. But it was still religion.

The saga of race in America is a tragic one—and it unfolds still. In Lincoln's hour upon the stage, many hoped he would go farther along the road toward equality than he did; many feared any step at all. But on he walked.

The colonization proposals underscored a tragic reality. One could—and many white Americans did—oppose slavery while failing to engage the prospective creation of a multiracial democracy.

And the tragedy of America is that we can imagine justice but cannot finally realize it.

September 1966. "I think that we've got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard. And, what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the economic plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years.

For thirty-six of the forty years between 1800 and 1840, either Jefferson or a self-described adherent of his served as president of the United States: James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, and Martin Van Buren.32 (John Quincy Adams, a one-term president, was the single exception.)

The Ku Klux Klan," the Reverend Charles Jefferson, the pro-Klan author of Roman Catholicism and the Ku Klux Klan, said, "is the Mussolini of America.

Intellectually I know America is no better than any other country; emotionally I know she is better than every other country," the novelist Sinclair Lewis

He was as important to the founding of a modern and multiethnic twentieth and twenty-first century America as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and Samuel Adams were to the creation of the republic in the eighteenth century. This is not hyperbole. It is fact--observable, discernible, undeniable fact.

Progress in America does not usually begin at the top and among the few, but from the bottom and among the many. It comes when the whispered hopes of those outside the mainstream rise in volume to reach the ears and hearts and minds of the powerful.

He embraced compromise as a necessary element of public life, engaged his political foes in the passage of important legislation, and was willing to break with the base of his own party in order to do what he thought was right, whatever the price. Quaint, yes: But it happened, in America, only a quarter of a century ago.

the only genuine obstacle to the rise of socialism or communism in America." Civil rights, Thurmond declared, were a Red plot against the Free World: "Only the States Rights Democrats—and we alone—have the moral courage to stand up to the Communists and tell them this foreign doctrine will not work in free America.

Like all Americans," he said, "I like big things; big prairies, big forests and mountains, big wheat fields, railroads, and herds of cattle, too, big factories, steamboats and everything else. But we must keep steadily in mind that no people were ever yet benefitted by riches if their prosperity corrupted their virtue.

America has always been torn between the ideal and the real, between noble goals and inevitable compromises.

I always consider the settlement of America with Reverence and Wonder," John Adams wrote in 1765, "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.

Garry Wills's classic 1978 book on the Declaration, Inventing America, put it well: "When Jefferson spoke of pursuing happiness," Wills wrote, "he had nothing vague or private in mind. He meant public happiness which is measurable; which is, indeed, the test and justification of any government.

The perpetual threat of conflict—first with one European power, then with another—infused American politics with a sense of constant crisis. Both Federalists and Republicans believed the fate of the United States could turn on the confrontation of the hour. In the broad public discourse, driven by partisan editors publishing partisan newspapers, there seemed no middle ground, only extremes of opinion or of outcome.

For the first hundred years, as far as I could tell, all that happened in America was that various people named Nathaniel had purchased land near rivers.

The Americans have always been better than the Iraqis at the leaflets. Early on in the first Gulf War, Iraqi PsyOps dropped a batch of their own leaflets on US troops, designed to be psychologically devastating. They read, 'Your wives are back at home having sex with Bart Simpson and Burt Reynolds.

These depictions of a broken America were also highly selective. When Ted Cruz listed the various ways Americans "have had their lives destroyed" — by terrorists, or police officers cut down in the line of duty, he pointedly excluded stories of innocent black people shot by the police.

The way the diagnosis is being made in America was not something we intended," he said. "Kids with extreme irritability and moodiness and temper tantrums are being called bipolar.