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Quotes About Nation

Jefferson was relentless in pursuing and putting down threats to his vision of a republican nation. Whether they were Federalist judges and other officeholders—including the chief justice of the United States—or hostile newspapermen, Jefferson's foes faced spirited challenges from the President's House.
~ Jon Meacham
should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still be unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and as a nation. For with a country as with a person, "What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
~ Jon Meacham
A true patriot salutes the flag but always makes sure it's flying over a nation that's not only free but fair, not only strong but just.
~ Jon Meacham
And perhaps most important, he gave the nation the idea of American progress—the animating spirit that the future could be better than the present or the past. The greatest American politicians since have prospered by projecting a Jeffersonian vision that the country's finest hours lay ahead.
~ Jon Meacham
The genius of America lies in its capacity to forge a single nation from peoples of remarkably diverse racial, religious, and ethnic origins….The American Creed envisages a nation composed of individuals making their own choices and accountable to themselves, not a nation based on inviolable ethnic communities….It is what all Americans should learn, because it is what binds all Americans together.
~ Jon Meacham
Franklin D. Roosevelt observed during the 1932 campaign, "The Presidency is not merely an administrative office. That's the least of it. It is more than an engineering job, efficient or inefficient. It is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership. All our great Presidents were leaders of thought at times when certain historic ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified.
~ Jon Meacham
If present reality contradicts such a vision, if they prefer to reject economic modernisation in favour of defence of tradition, if their nation has fallen behind its neighbour across the Rhine, if polls in the summer of 2014 showed that 90 per cent of respondents did not believe their elected president could handle the problems facing them, this leaves them feeling deprived of what they believe should be theirs by historic right and opens them to the temptation of extremist illusions.
~ Jonathan Fenby
If multiculturalism succeeds in making us a nation of independently empowered tribes, each tribe will be deprived of the comfort of victimhood and be forced to confront human limitation for what it is: a fixture of life.
~ Jonathan Franzen
How like a mental illness a nation's economy was!
~ Jonathan Franzen
Every facet of Amarillo a testament to a nation of bad-ass firsts: first in prison population, first in meat consumption, first in operational strategic warheads, first in per-capita carbon emissions, first in line for the Rapture. Whether American liberals liked it or not, Amarillo was how the rest of the world saw their country.
~ Jonathan Franzen
If Americans had to discriminate directly against other people's children, I believe most citizens would find this morally abhorrent. Denial, in an active sense, of other people's children is, however, rarely necessary in this nation. Inequality is mediated for us by a taxing system that most people do not fully understand and seldom scrutinize.
~ Jonathan Kozol
A balancing act of equally unlikely options was the only answer that the city and the nation gave to the requests of these poor people. This juggling of options—in this instance, countering school-funding efforts with the need for preschool—does no good if neither of these options is to be enacted anyway and if the act of balancing only serves to guarantee our permanent inaction in both areas.
~ Jonathan Kozol
If we cannot create peace or justice or compassion within the family we will be unable to do so within the nation or the world. Not until Joseph forgives his brothers and is reconciled with them can the story move on to the larger canvas of history.
~ Jonathan Sacks
I felt shame for living in a nation of unprecedented prosperity-a nation that spends a smaller percentage of income on food than any other civilization has in human history-but in the name of affordability treats the animals it eats with cruelty so extreme it would be illegal if inflicted on a dog.
~ Jonathan Safran Foer
For this kind of commodity will not bear exportation, the flesh being of too tender a consistence to admit a long continuance in salt, although perhaps I could name a country which would be glad to eat up our whole nation without it.
~ Jonathan Swift
the caprices of womankind are not limited by any climate or nation, and that they are much more uniform, than can be easily imagined.
~ Jonathan Swift
the other part of the parliament consisted of an assembly called the House of Commons, who were all principal gentlemen, freely picked and culled out by the people themselves, for their great abilities and love of their country, to represent the wisdom of the whole nation.
~ Jonathan Swift
Since there are no laws that can protect us from ourselves, no criminal code is capable of preventing a true crime against literature; though we can condemn the material suppression of literature¬Ã¢â'¬â€the persecution of writers, acts of censorship, the burning of books—we are powerless when it comes to its worst violation: that of not reading the books. For that crime, a person pays with his whole life; if the offender is a nation, it pays with its history.
~ Joseph Brodsky
Had art indeed depended on experience as much as the critical profession wants us to believe, we'd have far more – and far better – art on our hands than we do. A poet is always the product of his – that is, his nation's – language, to which living experiences are what logs are to fire
~ Joseph Brodsky
The community of today is the planet, not the bounded nation…patterns of coordinated agression can only break it into factions". We are in a time of "rationalized avarice and sanctified misunderstanding." Joseph Campbell, 1949
~ Joseph Campbell
Land of hope and glory, mother of the free,How shall we extol thee, who are born of thee?Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set;God, who made thee mighty, make theemightier yet.
~ A. C. Benson
Religion holds the solution to all problems of human relationship, whether they are between parents and children or nation and nation. Sooner or later, man has always had to decide whether he worships his own power or the power of God.
~ A. J. Toynbee
The one nation America has seemed to gain something of a special relationship with is Israel, the sliver of the Middle East that has no oil and little strategic importance.
~ A.A. Gill
There is a duty to improve the lot of others. Charity isn't personal, it's public. It's owed not just to God and salvation but to the nation: the idea that America itself deserves its citizens' charity, not because it is poor but because it could always be richer.
~ A.A. Gill