Quotes About Nation

So I ended my speech that night by quoting from Teddy's letter, hoping that his words would bolster the nation just as they had bolstered me. "What we face," he'd written, "is above all a moral issue; at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country." According to poll data, my address to Congress boosted public support for the healthcare bill, at least temporarily.

observed that two weeks earlier, when the House Republicans and I had issued sharply contrasting budget proposals, with profound implications for the nation, the news had instead been dominated by talk of my birth certificate. I noted that America faced enormous challenges and big decisions; that we should expect serious debates and sometimes fierce disagreements, because that was how our democracy was supposed to work, and I was certain that we had it in us to shape a better future together.

What greater form of patriotism is there than the belief that America is not yet finished; that we are strong enough to be self-critical that each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that it is in our power to remake this nation to more closely align with our highest ideals?

On this Memorial Day, as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes -- and I see many of them in the audience here today -- our sense of patriotism is particularly strong.

Your success as a family... our success as a nation... depends not on what happens inside the White House, but on what happens inside your house.

You know what the issue is? Do you want to know? It's what these guys have decided to call America. They have the audacity to say, 'There, you sons of bitches, don't lay a finger on it. That is a finished product.' But any country is still in the making. Always. That's just history, people have to see that.

To people who think of themselves as God's houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it.

Food transport has become a bizarre and profitable economic equation that's no longer really about feeding anyone: in our own nation we export 1.1 million tons of potatoes, while we also import 1.4 million tons.

The wounds of this ruptured nation lie open and ugly.

Tommy showed me one with the actual headline "Blight On the Nation." Another one said "smudge on the map," that he'd highlighted with yellow marker.

We will change our ways significantly as a nation not when some laws tell us we have to (remember Prohibition?), but when we want to.

But a nation gloats on the hostility of its enemies, whereas Hallie had proved the malevolence of some men we supplied with machine guns. Hallie was a skeleton in the civic closet.

We will change our ways significantly as a nation not when some laws tell us we have to (remember Prohibition?), but when we want

The policy of our nation is made in cities, controlled largely by urban voters who aren't well informed about the changes on the face of our land, and the men and women who work it.

The Marines aren't rooting for the new society. The U.S. is paying the contras, the guys that attack the farmers." Hallie would not laugh now, she would be inflamed. She said we were a nation in love with forgetting the facts.

To people who think of themselves as God's houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it.

Hot damn, look at him go! I am proud, proud to know that our great nation is being steered by men of such exceptional energy and passion. Not to mention rectitude.

The great prince Michael is the chief archangel, head of God's heavenly armies and divinely appointed protector of the nation of Israel

A nation's well-being, as well as its ability to compete, is conditioned by a single, pervasive cultural characteristic: the level of trust inherent in the society.

the disparity between Americans' veneration of the Bible and their understanding of it, painting a picture of a nation that believes God has spoken in scripture but can't be bothered to listen to what God has to say.

I'm sure trying to blackmail the president of a foreign nation qualifies as high crimes and misdemeanors.

Napoleon, that exponent of martial glory, sniffed at England as "a nation of shopkeepers." But at the time Britons earned 83 percent more than Frenchmen and enjoyed a third more calories, and we all know what happened at Waterloo.15

One of the dangers of "self-determination" is that there is really no such thing as a "nation" in the sense of an ethnocultural group that coincides with a patch of real estate. Unlike features of a landscape like trees and mountains, people have feet.

When a "nation" is conceived as a tacit social contract among people sharing a territory, like a condominium association, it is an essential means for advancing its members' flourishing. And of course it is genuinely admirable for one individual to sacrifice his or her interests for those of many individuals.