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United States

country primarily located in North America
(Redirected from Rhode Island)

"America", "US", "USA", and "United States of America" redirect here. For the landmass comprising North, Central, South America, and the Caribbean, see Americas. For other uses, see America (disambiguation).

⁠In God We Trust

The United States of America (USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal union of 50 states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 contiguous states border Canada to the north and Mexico to the south, with the states of Alaska to the northwest and the archipelagic Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean. The United States also asserts sovereignty over five major island territories and various uninhabited islands. The country has the world's third-largest land area, largest exclusive economic zone, and third-largest population, exceeding 334 million. Its three largest metropolitan areas are New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, and its three most populous states are California, Texas, and Florida.

E Pluribus Unum

Quotes

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  • Yankee Doodle went to town
       A-riding on a pony,
    Stuck a feather in his hat
       And called it macaroni.

17th century

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  • You brave heroic minds
    Worthy your country’s name,
         That honour still pursue;
         Go and subdue!
  • Religion stands on tiptoe in our land,
    Ready to pass to the American strand.
  •          Pray enter
    You are learnèd Europeans and we worse
    Than ignorant Americans.
  • Being brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of Heaven, who had brought them over the vast and furious Ocean, and delivered them from many perils and miseries.
  • They knew that they were Pilgrims and Strangers here below.
  • E pluribus unum
    • From many, one.
    • Traditional motto of the United States of America. First appeared on title page of The Gentleman's Miscellany (January, 1692). Pierre Antoine (Peter Anthony Motteaux) was editor. Dr. Simetiere affixed it to the American National Seal at time of the Revolution. See Howard P. Arnold, Historic Side Lights (1899). Compare: Ex pluribus unum facere; translation: "From many to make one"; St. Augustine, Confessions, bk. 4, 8, 13

18th century

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1700s

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  • I write the wonders of the Christian religion, flying from the depravations of Europe, to the American strand: and, assisted by the Holy Author of that religion, I do, with all conscience of truth, required therein by Him, who is the Truth itself, report the wonderful displays of His infinite power, wisdom, goodness, and faithfulness, wherewith his Divine Providence hath irradiated an Indian wilderness.

1750s

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  • Westward the course of empire takes its way;
       The first four acts already past,
    A fifth shall close the drama with the day:
       Time’s noblest offspring is the last.
    • George Berkeley, On the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America (1752), st. 6
    • Cf. John Quincy Adams, Oration at Plymouth (1802): "westward the star of empire takes its way"

1760s

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  • I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, 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.
    • John Adams, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765), note 2
  • Caesar had his Brutus—Charles the First, his Cromwell—and George the Third—("Treason," cried the Speaker)... may profit by their example. If this be treason, make the most of it.
  • I rejoice that America has resisted. Three millions of people, so dead to all the feelings of liberty, as voluntarily to submit to be slaves, would have been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest.
  • They equally detest the pageantry of a king, and the supercilious hypocrisy of a bishop.
    • Junius, Letters, no. 35: to the Printer of the Public Advertiser (December 19, 1769)

1770s

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  • I love the Americans because they love liberty, and I love them for the noble efforts they made in the last war.
  • We have been entertained with a great variety of phrases, to avoid calling this sort of people a mob. Some call them shavers, some call them geniuses. The plain English is, gentlemen, most probably a motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes and mulattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tars.
    • John Adams, defending the British soldiers who were charged with committing murder at the Boston Massacre, at their trial (November 27, 1770)
  • No more, America, in mournful strain
    Of wrongs, and grievance unredress'd complain,
    No longer shalt thou dread the iron chain,
    Which wanton Tyranny with lawless hand
    Had made, and with it meant t' enslave the land.
    • Phillis Wheatley, "To The Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth", sts. 2-3, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773)
  • Reflect how you are to govern a people who think they ought to be free, and think they are not. Your scheme yields no revenue; it yields nothing but discontent, disorder, disobedience; and such is the state of America, that after wading up to your eyes in blood, you could only end just where you begun; that is, to tax where no revenue is to be found, to—my voice fails me; my inclination indeed carries me no farther—all is confusion beyond it.
    • Edmund Burke, "American Taxation", First Speech on the Conciliation with America (April 19, 1774) [2]
  • I am not a Virginian, but an American.
    • Patrick Henry, in John Adams, Notes of Debates in the Continental Congress, Philadelphia (September 6, 1774): L. H. Butterfield (ed.) Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, vol. 2 (1961), p. 125
  • Young man, there is America—which at this day serves for little more than to amuse you with stories of savage men and uncouth manners; yet shall, before you taste of death, show itself equal to the whole of that commerce which now attracts the envy of the world.
  • A people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.
  • Nothing less will content me, than whole America.
  • In no country perhaps in the world is law so general a study. ... This study renders men acute, inquisitive, dexterous, prompt in attack, ready in defense, full of resources. ... They augur misgovernment at a distance, and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.
  • I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against an whole people.
  • Deny them this participation of freedom, and you break that sole bond, which originally made, and must still preserve the unity of the empire.
    • Edmund Burke, "The Thirteen Resolutions", Second Speech on Conciliation with America (March 22, 1775) [3]
  • I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!
    • Patrick Henry, Speech at the Virginia Convention (March 23, 1775), in William Wirt, Patrick Henry (1818), sect. 4, p. 123
  • What a glorious morning is this!
    • Samuel Adams, on hearing gunfire at Lexington (April 19, 1775), as quoted by Edward Everett, An Address, Delivered at Lexington, on the 19th (20th) April, 1835 (1835); this has often been paraphrased as "What a glorious morning for America!"
  • Unhappy it is though to reflect, that a Brother's Sword has been sheathed in a Brother's breast, and that, the once happy and peaceful plains of America are either to be drenched with Blood, or Inhabited by Slaves. Sad alternative! But can a virtuous Man hesitate in his choice?
  • By the waters of Babylon we sit down and weep, when we think of thee, O America!
  • We have counted the cost of this contest, and find nothing so dreadful as voluntary slavery... Our cause is just, our union is perfect.
    • John Dickinson, Declaration of Causes and Necessities, presented to Congress (July 8, 1775), in C. J. Stillè, The Life and Times of John Dickinson (1891), ch. 5
  • We are told, that the subjection of Americans may tend to the diminution of our own liberties; an event, which none but very perspicacious politicians are able to foresee. If slavery be thus fatally contagious, how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?
  • The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind... Mingling religion with politics may be disavowed and reprobated by every inhabitant of America... But where says some is the King of America? I'll tell you Friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the Royal Brute of Britain. Yet that we may not appear to be defective even in earthly honors, let a day be solemnly set apart for proclaiming the charter; let it be brought forth placed on the divine law, the word of God; let a crown be placed thereon, by which the world may know, that so far as we approve as monarchy, that in America the law is king... Receive the fugitive and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.
  • We are in the very midst of a Revolution, the most complete, unexpected, and remarkable of any in the History of Nations.
    • John Adams, Letter to William Cushing, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (June 9, 1776) [6]
 
Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
  • That all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.
 
Conquer or die. —George Washington
  • The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their houses and farms are to be pillaged and destroyed, and themselves consigned to a state of wretchedness from which no human efforts will deliver them. The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army. Our cruel and unrelenting enemy leaves us only the choice of brave resistance, or the most abject submission. We have, therefore, to resolve to conquer or die.
  • I only regret, that I have but one life to lose for my country.
    • Apocryphal last words of Nathan Hale (September 22, 1776), as quoted by John Montresor
    • Cf. Joseph Addison, Cato (1713), act 4, sc. 4:
      How beautiful is death, when earn'd by virtue!
      Who would not be that youth? What pity is it
      That we can die but once to serve our country.
  • Not a place upon earth might be so happy as America. Her situation is remote from all the wrangling world, and she has nothing to do but to trade with them. A man can distinguish himself between temper and principle, and I am as confident, as I am that God governs the world, that America will never be happy till she gets clear of foreign dominion. Wars, without ceasing, will break out till that period arrives, and the continent must in the end be conqueror; for though the flame of liberty may sometimes cease to shine, the coal can never expire.
  • It is the object only of war that makes it honorable. And if there was ever a just war since the world began, it is this in which America is now engaged. ... We fight not to enslave, but to set a country free, and to make room upon the earth for honest men to live in.
  • If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms—never—never—never! You cannot conquer America.
  • Let tyrants shake their iron rod,
       And Slav'ry clank her galling chains,
    We fear them not, we trust in God,
       New England's God forever reigns.
  • Easy I am so far, that the ill success of the American war has saved us from slavery—in truth, I am content that liberty will exist anywhere, and amongst Englishmen, even cross the Atlantic.
    • Horace Walpole, Letter to Horace Mann (February 25, 1779), in Peter Cunningham (ed.) Letters, vol. 10 (1858), p. 182 [7]
  • We must consult Brother Jonathan.
    • George Washington's apocryphal reference to his secretary and Aide-de-camp, Colonel Jonathan Trumbull; the phrase, Brother Jonathan, later came to mean the American people, collectively: Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, vol. 7 (1905), p. 94

1780s

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  • What then is the American, this new man? He is either an European, or the descendant of an European, hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. ... Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.
  • Our citizenship in the United States is our national character. Our citizenship in any particular state is only our local distinction. By the latter we are known at home, by the former to the world. Our great title is Americans.
  • America is open to receive not only the Opulent and respectable Stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations and Religions; whom we shall wellcome to a participation of all our rights and previleges, if by decency and propriety of conduct they appear to merit the enjoyment.
    • George Washington, Letter to the members of the Volunteer Association and other Inhabitants of the Kingdom of Ireland who have lately arrived in the City of New York (December 2, 1783), as quoted in John C. Fitzpatrick (ed.) The Writings of George Washington, vol. 27 (1938), p. 254
  • I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country; he is a bird of bad moral character ... like those among men who live by sharping and robbing, he is generally poor, and often very lousy ... The turkey ... is a much more respectable bird, and withal a true original native of America.
  • Much less is it adviseable for a Person to go thither [to America], who has no other Quality to recommend him but his Birth. In Europe it has indeed its Value; but it is a Commodity that cannot be carried to a worse Market than that of America, where people do not inquire concerning a Stranger, What is he? but, What can he do?
  • Neither my father or mother, grandfather or grandmother, great grandfather or great grandmother, nor any other relation that I know of, or care a farthing for, has been in England these one hundred and fifty years; so that you see I have not one drop of blood in my veins but what is American.
    • John Adams, to a foreign ambassador (1785), as quoted in Charles F. Adams (ed.) The Works of John Adams (1851), p. 392
  • Then rushed to meet the insulting foe;
    They took the spear—but left the shield.
    • Philip Freneau, "To the Memory of the Brave Americans Who Fell at Eutaw Springs, September 8, 1781", Poems (Philadelphia: Francis Bailey, 1786); cf. Walter Scott, Marmion (1808), canto 3, introduction, st. 3
  • O come the time, and haste the day,
       When man shall man no longer crush,
    When Reason shall enforce her sway,
       Nor these fair regions raise our blush,
    Where still the African complains,
    And mourns his yet unbroken chains.
    • Philip Freneau, "On the Emigration to America and Peopling the Western Country", Poems (1786)
  • The loss of America what can repay?
    New colonies seek for at Botany Bay.
    • John Freeth (d. 1808), "Botany Bay", in The New London Magazine, supplement to vol. 2 (January, 1787), p. 709 [8]
  • All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and wellborn, the other the mass of the people. ... The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second, and as they cannot receive any advantage by a change, they therefore will ever maintain good government.
  • Let Americans disdain to be the instruments of European greatness. Let the thirteen States, bound together in a strict and indissoluble Union, concur in erecting one great American system, superior to the control of all transatlantic force or influence, and able to dictate the terms of the connection between the old and the new world!
  • Columbia, Columbia, to glory arise,
    The queen of the world and the child of the skies!
    Thy genius commands thee; with rapture behold,
    While ages on ages thy splendors unfold.
    • Timothy Dwight, "Columbia", in The American Museum, vol. 1 (June, 1787), p. 566 [10]
  • Powel: Well, Doctor, what have we got?
    Franklin: A republic, Madam, if you can keep it.
    Powel: And why not keep it?
    Franklin: Because the people, on tasting the dish, are always disposed to eat more of it than does them good.
  • We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
  • I dwell on this prospect with every satisfaction which an ardent love for my Country can inspire: since there is no truth more thoroughly established, than that there exists in the œconomy and course of nature, an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness, between duty and advantage, between the genuine maxims of an honest and magnanimous policy, and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity: Since we ought to be no less persuaded that the propitious smiles of Heaven, can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right, which Heaven itself has ordained: And since the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the Republican model of Government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.
    • George Washington, First Inaugural Address (April 30, 1789), published in John C. Fitzpatrick (ed.) The Writings of George Washington, vol. 30 (1939), pp. 294-5.

1790s

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  • The establishment of our new government seemed to be the last great experiment for promoting human happiness by a reasonable compact in civil society. It was to be in the first instance, in a considerable degree, a government of accommodation as well as a government of laws. Much was to be done by prudence, much by conciliation, much by firmness. Few, who are not philosophical spectators, can realize the difficult and delicate part, which a man in my situation had to act. All see, and most admire, the glare which hovers round the external happiness of elevated office.
  • [M]ankind are all formed by the same Almighty being, alike objects of his Care & equally designed for the Enjoyment of Happiness the Christian Religion teaches us to believe & the Political Creed of America fully coincides with the Position. ... [B]lessings ought rightfully to be administered, without distinction of Colour, to all descriptions of People, so they indulge themselves in the pleasing expectation, that nothing, which can be done for the relive of the unhappy objects of their care, will be either omitted or delayed. ... From a persuasion that equal liberty was originally the Portion, It is still the Birthright of all men.
  • Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
  • A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
  • We have abundant reason to rejoice, that, in this land, the light of truth and reason has triumphed over the power of bigotry and superstition, and that every person may here worship God according to the dictates of his own heart. In this enlightened age, and in this land of equal liberty, it is our boast, that a man's religious tenets will not forfeit the protection of the laws, nor deprive him of the right of attaining & holding the highest offices that are known in the United States.
 
... as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.
—George Washington
  • To the efficacy and permanency of your Union, a Government for the whole is indispensable.
  • In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.
  • Observe good faith and justice towards all Nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all.
  • Guard against the postures of pretended patriotism.
  • As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, as it has in itself no character or enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen, and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
  • Hail, Columbia! happy land!
    Hail, ye heroes! heavenborn band!
    Who fought and bled in Freedom's cause.
  • Firm, united, let us be,
    Rallying round our Liberty;
    As a band of brothers joined,
    Peace and safety we shall find.

19th century

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1800s

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1810s

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  • O! say can you see by the dawn's early light,
       What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming,
    Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
       O'er the ramparts we watch'd, were so gallantly streaming?
    And the Rockets' red glare, the Bombs bursting in air,
    Gave proof through the night that our Flag was still there;
    ⁠O! say does that star-spangled Banner yet wave,
    ⁠O'er the Land of the free and the home of the brave?
  • No refuge could save the hireling and slave,
    From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave.
  • Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
    And this be our motto—"In God is our Trust."
  • When Freedom from her mountain height,
       Unfurled her standard to the air,
    She tore the azure robe of night,
       And set the stars of glory there.
  • Forever float that standard sheet!
       Where breathes the foe but falls before us,
    With Freedom’s soil beneath our feet,
       And Freedom’s banner streaming o’er us?
    • Joseph Rodman Drake, "The American Flag", in the New York Evening Post (May 29, 1819); collected in The Culprit Fay and Other Poems (1835), published posthumously by Drake's daughter. Attributed also to Fitz-Greene Halleck

1820s

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Who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue? —Sydney Smith
  • In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue?
    • Sydney Smith, "America", in The Edinburgh Review, vol. 33, no. 65 (January 1820), p. 79 [16]
  • We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.
  • America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government.
  • America ... well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extraction, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. ... She might become dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.
  • Slavery in this country, I have seen hanging over it like a black cloud for half a century.
    • John Adams (1821), as quoted in Joseph J. Ellis, Passionate Sage (York: Norton, 1993), p. 138
  • Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.
    • John Quincy Adams, Address as Secretary of State to the U.S. House of Representatives (July 4, 1821) [17]
  • The American continents ... are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.
  • In the wars of the European powers in matters relating to themselves we have never taken any part, nor does it comport with our policy so to do.
  • Yet, still, from either beach,
    The voice of blood shall reach,
    More audible than speech,
      We are one!
    • Washington Allston, "Lines (America and England)", in The Cincinnati Literary Gazette (July 30, 1825), p. 244 [18]
  • Few men exhibit greater diversity, or, if we may so express it, greater antithesis of character than the native warrior of North America. In war, he is daring, boastful, cunning, ruthless, self-denying, and self-devoted; in peace, just, generous, hospitable, revengeful, superstitious, modest, and commonly chaste.
  • I called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old.
    • George Canning, Address to the British House of Commons (December 12, 1826), in R. Therry (ed.) Speeches of Lord Canning, vol. 6 (London: James Ridgway, 1826), p. 111 [19]
  • The breaking waves dashed high
       On a stern and rock-bound coast,
    And the woods against a stormy sky
       Their giant branches tossed.
  • And the heavy night hung dark,
       The hills and waters o'er,
    When a band of exiles moored their bark
       On the wild New England shore.
  • What sought they thus afar?
       Bright jewels of the mine,
    The wealth of seas, the spoils of war?
       They sought a faith's pure shrine.
  • Ay, call it holy ground,
       The soil where first they trod;
    They have left unstained what there they found —
       Freedom to whorship God.
    • Felicia Hemans, "The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers", sts. 1, 2, 9, 10
    • The League of the Alps, ... and Other Poems (1826), p. 4 [20]
  • Amerika, du hast es besser
    Als unser Kontinent, das alte,
    Hast keine verfallene Schlösser
    Und keine Basalte.
    • America, yours is the better lot
      Than is our continent’s, the old.
      You have no ruined castles’ rot
      Nor marbles cold.
    • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, „Den Vereinigten Staaten“ (1827), as translated in Christian F. Melz, "Goethe and America", College English, vol. 10, no. 8 (1949), p. 426

1830s

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  • My country, 'tis of thee,
    Sweet land of liberty,—
       Of thee I sing:
    Land where my fathers died,
    Land of the Pilgrim's pride,
    From every mountain side
       Let freedom ring.
  • Long may our land be bright
    With freedom’s holy light;
    Protect us by thy might,
       Great God, our King!
  • The Congress, the Executive, and the Court must each for itself be guided by its own opinion of the Constitution. Each public officer who takes an oath to support the Constitution swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as it is understood by others.
  • We have built no national temples but the Capitol; we consult no common oracle but the Constitution.
    • Rufus Choate, The Importance of Illustrating New-England History by a Series of Romances like the Waverley Novels (1833), a lecture delivered at Salem, Massachusetts.
  • I leave this rule for others when I’m dead,
    Be always sure you’re right — then go ahead.
  • Don’t shoot, Colonel, I’ll come down: I know I’m a gone coon.
  • Over all, rocks, wood, and water, brooded the spirit of repose, and the silent energy of nature stirred the soul to its inmost depths.
    • Thomas Cole, "American Scenery", in the American Monthly (January, 1836), p. 7
  • A power has risen up in the government greater than the people themselves, consisting of many and various and powerful interests, combined into one mass, and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surplus in the banks.
    • John C. Calhoun, Speech (May 27, 1836); this is the source of the phrase, "Cohesive power of public plunder"
  • America! half brother of the world!
    With something good and bad of every land.

1840s

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  • In the United States, the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own.
  • Americans of all ages, all stations of life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations... In democratic countries knowledge of how to combine is the mother of all other forms of knowledge; on its progress depends that of all the others... The people reign in the American political world as the Deity does in the universe. They are the cause and the aim of all things; everything comes from them, and everything is absorbed in them... In the United States the sovereign authority is religious, and consequently hypocrisy must be common; but there is no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America; and there can be no greater proof of its utility and of its conformity to human nature than that its influence is powerfully felt over the most enlightened and free nation of the earth.
    • Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2 (1840), sec. 2, ch. 5
 
If there breathe on earth a slave,
Are ye truly free and brave?
—James Russell Lowell
  • If there breathe on earth a slave,
    Are ye truly free and brave?
    If ye do not feel the chain,
    When it works a brother's pain,
    Are ye not base slaves indeed,
    Slaves unworthy to be freed?
  • I am disappointed. This is not the republic I came to see; this is not the republic of my imagination.
 
A spirit of hostile interference against us... checking the fulfilment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions. —John L. O'Sullivan
  • Texas is now ours.[...] Her star and her stripe may already be said to have taken their place in the glorious blazon of our common nationality; and the sweep of our eagle’s wing already includes within its circuit the wide extent of her fair and fertile land. She is no longer to us a mere geographical space–a certain combination of coast, plain, mountain, valley, forest and stream. She is no longer to us a mere country on the map. She comes within the dear and sacred designation of Our Country[...]. [O]ther nations have undertaken to intrude themselves[...] in a spirit of hostile interference against us, for the avowed object of thwarting our policy and hampering our power, limiting our greatness and checking the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions. This we have seen done by England, our old rival and enemy; and by France, strangely coupled with her against us[...].
    • John L. O'Sullivan, in The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, vol. 17 (July–August 1845), p. 5 [24]
  • They enslave their children's children who make compromise with sin.
    • James Russell Lowell, "Verses Suggested by the Present Crisis", in the Boston Courier (December 11, 1845)
  • In thinking of America, I sometimes find myself admiring her bright blue sky — her grand old woods — her fertile fields — her beautiful rivers — her mighty lakes, and star-crowned mountains. But my rapture is soon checked, ... [w]hen I remember that all is cursed with the infernal actions of slaveholding, robbery and wrong, — when I remember that with the waters of her noblest rivers, the tears of my brethren are borne to the ocean, disregarded and forgotten, and that her most fertile fields drink daily of the warm blood of my outraged sisters, I am filled with unutterable loathing.
    • Frederick Douglass, Letter to William Lloyd Garrison (January 1, 1846), in Philip Foner (ed) Life and Writings (New York, 1950), vol. 1, p. 125 [25]
  • It does not follow because many books are written by persons born in America that there exists an American literature. Books which imitate or represent the thoughts and life of Europe do not constitute an American literature. Before such can exist, an original idea must animate this nation and fresh currents of life must call into life fresh thoughts along its shores.
  • On Fame’s eternal camping ground
    Their silent tents are spread,
    And Glory guards, with solemn round,
    The bivouac of the dead.
  • O, Columbia, the gem of the ocean,
       The home of the brave and the free,
    The shrine of each patriot's devotion,
       A world offers homage to thee.
    • Thomas a'Becket, "O, Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean", in The Public School Singing Book (Philadelphia: Leary & Getz, 1848), p. 4 [26]
 
All men and women are created equal. —Elizabeth Cady Stanton
  • We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal.
    • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, "Declaration of Sentiments", at the First Woman’s Rights Convention, Seneca Falls, New York (July 19–20, 1848) [27]

1850s

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  • I was born an American; I will live an American; I shall die an American!
    • Daniel Webster, Speech (July 17, 1850); reported in Edward Everett (ed.) The Works of Daniel Webster (1851), p. 437
  • Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!
    Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
    Humanity with all its fears,
    With all the hopes of future years,
    Is hanging breathless on thy fate!
  • Neither do I acknowledge the right of Plymouth to the whole rock. No, the rock underlies all America: it only crops out here.
    • Wendell Phillips, Speech at the dinner of the Pilgrim Society at Plymouth (December 21, 1855)
  • The Senator from South Carolina has read many books of chivalry, and believes himself a chivalrous knight, with sentiments of honor and courage. Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight — I mean the harlot, Slavery. For her, his tongue is always profuse in words.
  • Asylum of the oppressed of every nation.
    • Phrase used in the Democratic platform of 1856, referring to the U.S. Henry Harrison Smith (ed.) National Conventions of the Democratic and Republican Parties, from 1832 to 1856 (1892), pp. 77, 83, 87, 114 [29]
  • "A house divided against itself cannot stand." I believe this government cannot endure permanently, half slave and half free.
  • Let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man—this race and that race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position—discarding our standard that we have left us. Let us discard all these things, and unite as one people throughout this land, until we shall once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal.
    • Abraham Lincoln, Address to Chicagoan abolitionists (July 10, 1858); Collected Works, vol. 2 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1953), p. 501
  • I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land can never be purged away but with blood.
    • John Brown, in a note written just before his execution (December 2, 1859); most sources say it was handed to the guard, but some dispute that and claim it was handed to a reporter accompanying him; as quoted in Richard Josiah Hinton, John Brown and his Men (1894), p. 397
  • This is a beautiful country. I have never noticed it before.
    • John Brown, last words, to his jailer; as quoted in Hinton (1894), p. 397
  • I wish I was in de land ob cotton,
    Old times dar am not forgotten.
       Look away! Look away!
       Look away! Dixie Land!
  • In Dixie’s land, we’ll took our stand,
    To lib an’ die in Dixie!

1860s

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  • I will put in my poems that with you is heroism upon land and sea,
    And I will report all heroism from an American point of view.
  • I can anticipate no greater calamity for the country than a dissolution of the Union. It would be an accumulation of all the evils we complain of, and I am willing to sacrifice everything but honor for its preservation. ... Still, a Union that can only be maintained by swords and bayonets, and in which strife and civil war are to take the place of brotherly love and kindness, has no charm for me. I shall mourn for my country and for the welfare and progress of mankind. If the Union is dissolved and the Government disrupted, I shall return to my native State and share the miseries of my people, and, save in defense will draw my sword on none.
  • We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
  • The bird of our country is a debilitated chicken, disguised in eagle feathers. We have never been a nation; we are only an aggregate of communities, ready to fall apart at the first serious shock and without a centre of vigorous national life to keep us together.
    • George Templeton Strong, Diary entry (March 11, 1861); Allan Nevins (ed.), The Diary of George Templeton Strong (1952), vol. 3, p. 109
  • Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
    He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
    He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
       His truth is marching on.
  • In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
    With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me.
    As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
       While God is marching on.
  • The Union forever, hurrah! boys, hurrah!
    Down with the traitors, up with the stars;
    While we rally round the flag, boys, we rally once again,
    Shouting the battle cry of freedom!
  • Gigantic daughter of the West,
    We drink to thee across the flood, ...
    For art not thou of English blood?
    • Alfred Tennyson, "Hands all Round", in the Examiner (1862); London Times (1880)
  • Give it only the fulcrum of Plymouth Rock, an idea will upheave the continent.
    • Wendell Phillips, Speech, New York (January 21, 1863)
    • Speeches, Lectures, and Letters (Boston: James Redpath, 1863), pp. 221, 539 [31]
  • When Johnny comes marching home again,
       Hurrah, hurrah!
    We'll give him a hearty welcome then,
       Hurrah, hurrah!
    The men will cheer, the boys will shout,
    The ladies, they will all turn out,
       And we'll all feel gay,
    When Johnny comes marching home.
  • My opinion is that the Northern States will manage somehow to muddle through.
    • John Bright, during the Civil War, as quoted in Justin McCarthy, Reminiscences (1899), vol. 1, p. 85
  • Earth's biggest Country's gut her soul
       An' risen up Earth's Greatest Nation.
    • James Russell Lowell, The Biglow Papers, 2nd series (London: Trübner & Co., 1865), no. 7, st. 21 [32]
    • See The Atlantic (February, 1863), p. 265 [33]
 
We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. —Abraham Lincoln
  • Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow, this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
  • You cannot have peace and a division of our country. If the United States submits to a division now, it will not stop, but will go on until we reap the fate of Mexico, which is eternal war. The United States does and must assert its authority, wherever it once had power; for, if it relaxes one bit to pressure, it is gone... We do want and will have a just obedience to the laws of the United States. That we will have.
  • For mere vengeance I would do nothing. This nation is too great to look for mere revenge. But for security of the future I would do every thing.
    • James A. Garfield, speech in New York City (April 15, 1865) on the occasion of Abraham Lincoln's assassination, as reported in John Clark Ridpath, The Life and Work of James A. Garfield (1882 memorial edition), p. 194. Several biographers include this speech, but accounts of his remarks that day vary
  • To grant suffrage to the black man in this country is not innovation, but restoration. It is a return to the ancient principles and practices of the fathers.
    • James A. Garfield, Oration at Ravenna, Ohio (4 July 1865), in Burke A. Hinsdale (ed.) The Works of James Abraham Garfield, vol. 1 (Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1882), p. 88
  • When asked what State he hails from,
       Our sole reply shall be,
    He comes from Appomattox
       And its famous apple tree.
    • Charles G. Halpine (Miles O'Reilly), Verse, quoted in Alfred R. Conkling (ed.) Life and Letters of Roscoe Conkling, vol. 2 (New York: Charles L. Webster & Co., 1889), p. 596 [34]
    • Variants: "Charter Song of the Grant Club", in The Grant Songster (New York: Haney & Co., 1867), p. 6 [35]
  • As the United States is the freest of all nations, so, too, its people sympathize with all people struggling for liberty and self-government; but while so sympathizing it is due to our honor that we should abstain from enforcing our views upon unwilling nations and from taking an interested part, without invitation.

1870s

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  • The present difficulty, in bringing all parts of the United States to a happy unity and love of country grows out of the prejudice to color. The prejudice is a senseless one, but it exists.
    • Ulysses S. Grant, Memorandum: Reasons why Santo Domingo should be annexed to the United States (1869–1870) [36]
  • America is a country of young men.
  • It appears the Americans have taken umbrage. The deuce they have! Whereabouts is that?
    • In Punch magazine, vol. 63 (1872), p. 189
  • Beautiful credit! The foundation of modern society. Who shall say that this is not the golden age of mutual trust, of unlimited reliance upon human promises? That is a peculiar condition of society which enables a whole nation to instantly recognize point and meaning in the familiar newspaper anecdote, which puts into the mouth of a distinguished speculator in lands and mines this remark:—"I wasn't worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two millions of dollars."
  • Under existing conditions the negro votes the Republican ticket because he knows his friends are of that party. Many a good citizen votes the opposite, not because he agrees with the great principles of state which separate parties, but because, generally, he is opposed to negro rule. This is a most delusive cry. Treat the negro as a citizen and a voter, as he is and must remain, and soon parties will be divided, not on the color line, but on principle. Then we shall have no complaint of sectional interference.
 
My lands are where my dead lie buried. —Crazy Horse
  • My lands are where my dead lie buried.
  • I will remain what I am until I die, a hunter, and when there are no buffalo or other game I will send my children to hunt and live on prairie, for where an Indian is shut up in one place his body becomes weak.
  • I did more for the Russian serf in giving him land as well as personal liberty, than America did for the negro slave set free by the proclamation of President Lincoln. I am at a loss to understand how you Americans could have been so blind as to leave the negro slave without tools to work out his salvation. In giving him personal liberty, you gave him an obligation to perform to the state which he must be unable to fulfill. Without property of any kind he cannot educate himself and his children. I believe the time must come when many will question the manner of American emancipation of the negro slaves in 1863. The vote, in the hands of an ignorant man, without either property or self respect, will be used to the damage of the people at large; for the rich man, without honor or any kind of patriotism, will purchase it, and with it swamp the rights of a free people.
  • Encourage free schools, and resolve that not one dollar of money shall be appropriated to the support of any sectarian school. Resolve that neither the state nor nation, or both combined, shall support institutions of learning other than those sufficient to afford every child growing up in the land the opportunity of a good common school education, unmixed with sectarian, pagan, or atheistical tenets. Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private school, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and the state forever separate.
    • Ulysses S. Grant, Speech at the Annual Reunion of the Society of the Army of Tennessee (September 29, 1875), Des Moines, Iowa
    • Jeremiah Chaplin (ed.) Words of our Hero, U.S. Grant (Boston: D. Lothrop & Co., [1885]), p. 31 [37]
  • As soon as slavery fired upon the flag it was felt, we all felt, even those who did not object to slaves, that slavery must be destroyed. We felt that it was a stain to the Union that men should be bought and sold like cattle.
  • One might ennumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left. No State, in the European sense of the word, and indeed barely a specific national name. No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great universities nor public schools—no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class—no Epsom nor Ascot! ... The natural remark in the almost lurid light of such an indictment, would be that if these things are left out, everything is left out.

1880s

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  • The elevation of the negro race from slavery to the full rights of citizenship is the most important political change we have known since the adoption of the Constitution of 1787. No thoughtful man can fail to appreciate its beneficent effect upon our institutions and people. It has freed us from the perpetual danger of war and dissolution. It has added immensely to the moral and industrial forces of our people. It has liberated the master as well as the slave from a relation which wronged and enfeebled both.
  • I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,...
    The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,
    Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else...
  • That which in England we call the middle class is in America virtually the nation.
  • We Americans have yet to really learn our own antecedents, and sort them, to unify them. They will be found ampler than has been supposed, and in widely different sources. Thus far, impress'd by New England writers and schoolmasters, we tacitly abandon ourselves to the notion that our United States has been fashion'd from the British Islands only, and essentially form a second England only — which is a very great mistake.
    • Walt Whitman, "The Spanish Element in Our Nationality", Letter to the Philadelphia Press (July 20, 1883), later published in The Complete Prose Works of Walt Whitman (1892), pt. 5 [40]
  • "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
    With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
    Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
    The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
    Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
    I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
  • The American Philistine was a livelier sort of Philistine than ours.
 
Once I moved about like the wind. Now I surrender to you and that is all. —Geronimo
  • We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.
  • What really dissatisfies in American civilization is the want of the interesting, a want due chiefly to the want of those two great elements of the interesting, which are elevation and beauty.
  • Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
    All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old,
    Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
    Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
    A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
    Chair’d in the adamant of Time.
    • Walt Whitman, "America", in the New York Herald (February 11, 1888)
  • It seems to superficial observers that all Americans are born busy. It is not so. They are born with a fear of not being busy.
  • Bring me men to match my mountains,
       Bring me men to match my plains,
    Men with empires in their purpose,
       And new eras in their brains.
    • Sam Walter Foss, "The Coming American", in Sidney Perley (ed.) The Poets of Essex County, Massachusetts (1889), p. 56 [41]

1890s

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  • A period of about twelve years measured the beat of the pendulum. After the Declaration of Independence, twelve years had been needed to create an efficient Constitution; another twelve years of energy brought a reaction against the government then created; a third period of twelve years was ending in a sweep toward still greater energy; and already a child could calculate the result of a few more such returns.
    • Henry Adams, A History of the United States of America during the First Administration of James Madison (1890), vol. 2, ch. 6
  • The Republican form of Government is the highest form of government; but because of this it requires the highest type of human nature—a type nowhere at present existing.
  • In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs for ever and ever. Fortunately in America Journalism has carried its authority to the grossest and most brutal extreme. As a natural consequence it has begun to create a spirit of revolt. People are amused by it, or disgusted by it, according to their temperaments. But it is no longer the real force it was. It is not seriously treated.
 
One nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
  • I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
  • The youth of America is their oldest tradition. It has been going on now for three hundred years. To hear them talk one would imagine they were in their first childhood. As far as civilisation goes they are in their second.
  • Mrs. Allonby: They say, Lady Hunstanton, that when good Americans die they go to Paris.
    Lady Hunstanton: Indeed? And when bad Americans die, where do they go to?
    Lord Illingworth: Oh, they go to America.
    • Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance (1893), act 1
  • Great Britain is a republic with a hereditary president, while the United States is a monarchy with an elective king.
    • The Knoxville Journal (February 9, 1896), as quoted in Peter Heys Gries, The Politics of American Foreign Policy (2014), p. 170 [43] [44]
  • The white officers, taking life and honor in their hands, cast in their lot with men of a despised race unproved in war, and risked death as inciters of servile insurrection if taken prisoners, besides encountering all the common perils of camp march and battle.
    The black rank and file volunteered when disaster clouded the Union cause, served without pay for eighteen months till given that of white troops, faced threatened enslavement if captured, were brave in action, patient under heavy and dangerous labors, and cheerful amid hardships and privations.
    Together they gave to the nation and the world undying proof that Americans of African descent possess the pride, courage, and devotion of the patriot soldier.
  • So on we worked, and waited for the light,
    And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
    And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
    Went home and put a bullet through his head.
  • What the horses o’ Kansas think today, the horses of America will think tomorrow; an’ I tell you that when the horses of America rise in their might, the day o’ the Oppressor is ended.
  • Home from the lonely cities, time's wreck, and the naked woe,
    Home through the clean great waters where freemen's pennants blow,
    Home to the land men dream of, where all the nations go.

20th century

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1900s

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  • The growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest. ... The American beauty rose can be produced in the splendor and fragrance which bring cheer to its beholder only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it.
 
Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.
—Teddy Roosevelt
  • O beautiful for spacious skies,
    For amber waves of grain,
    For purple mountain majesties
    Above the fruited plain!
    America! America!
    God shed His grace on thee,
    And crown thy good with brotherhood
    From sea to shining sea!
  • Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.
    • Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Reportedly first said by Holmes in a speech in 1904; alternately phrased as "Taxes are what we pay for civilized society, including the chance to insure", Compania General De Tabacos De Filipinas v. Collector of Internal Revenue, 275 U.S. 87, 100, dissenting opinion (November 21, 1927). The first variation is quoted by the IRS above the entrance to their headquarters at 1111 Constitution Avenue, Washington, D.C.
  • That the American, by temperament, worked to excess, was true; work and whiskey were his stimulants; work was a form of vice; but he never cared much for money or power after he earned them. The amusement of the pursuit was all the amusement he got from it.
  • The American mind — the Bostonian as well as the Southern or Western — likes to walk straight up to its object, and assert or deny something that it takes for a fact; it has a conventional approach, a conventional analysis, and a conventional conclusion, as well as a conventional expression, all the time loudly asserting its unconventionality.
    • Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1918), ch. 24
  • The true American knew something of the facts, but nothing of the feelings; he read the letter but he never felt the law.
    • Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1918), ch. 25
  • For this new creation, born since 1900, a historian asked no longer to be teacher or even friend; he asked only to be a pupil, and promised to be docile, for once, even though trodden under foot; for he could see that the new American — the child of incalculable coal-power, chemical power, electric power, and radiating energy, as well as of new forces yet undetermined — must be a sort of God compared with any former creation of nature. At the rate of progress since 1800, every American who lived into the year 2000 would know how to control unlimited power. He would think in complexities unimaginable to an earlier mind. He would deal with problems altogether beyond the range of earlier society. To him the nineteenth century would stand on the same plane with the fourth — equally childlike — and he would only wonder how both of them, knowing so little, and so weak in force, should have done so much.
    • Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1918), ch. 34
 
America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming!
—Israel Zangwill
  • America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming!
  • As to the American tradition of non-meddling, Anarchism asks that it be carried down to the individual himself. It demands no jealous barrier of isolation; it knows that such isolation is undesirable and impossible; but it teaches that by all men's strictly minding their own business, a fluid society, freely adapting itself to mutual needs, wherein all the world shall belong to all men, as much as each has need or desire, will result. And when Modern Revolution has thus been carried to the heart of the whole world — if it ever shall be, as I hope it will — then may we hope to see a resurrection of that proud spirit of our fathers which put the simple dignity of Man above the gauds of wealth and class, and held that to be an American was greater than to be a king. In that day there shall be neither kings nor Americans — only Men; over the whole earth, Men.
  • So it's home again, and home again, America for me!
    My heart is turning home again, and I long to be
    In the land of youth and freedom beyond the ocean bars,
    Where the air is full of sunshine, and the flag is full of stars.
    • Henry Van Dyke, "America for Me" (June, 1909), in Poems (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1911) [46]
  • America is a mistake; a gigantic mistake, it is true, but none the less a mistake.
    • Sigmund Freud, remark to Ernest Jones (1909), as quoted in The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, vol. 2‎ (1955), p. 60 [47]
    • Also quoted as, "Yes, America is gigantic, but a gigantic mistake." in Memories of a Psycho-analyst (1959), ch. 9; and as, "America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but I am afraid it is not going to be a success." in Ronald W. Clark, Freud: the Man and his Cause (1980), pt. 3, ch. 12
  • They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one; they promised to take our land, and they took it.
    • Red Cloud (d. 1909) in his old age, as quoted in Robert M. Utley, The Last Days of the Sioux Nation (1963)

1910s

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  • He held, too, in his enlightened way, that Americans have a perfect right to exist. But he did often find himself wishing Mr Rhodes had not enabled them to exercise that right in Oxford.
  • America is a tune. It must be sung together.
  • The pious ones of Plymouth who, reaching the Rock, first fell upon their knees and then upon the aborigines.
  • The North! the South! the West! the East!
    No one the most and none the least,
    But each with its own heart and mind,
    Each of its own distinctive kind,
    Yet each a part and none the whole,
    But all together form one soul;
    That soul Our Country at its best,
    No North, no South, no East, no West,
    No yours, no mine, but always Ours,
    Merged in one Power our lesser powers,
    For no one's favor, great or small,
    But all for Each and each for All.
  • I could come back to America (could be carried back on a stretcher) to die—but never, never to live.
    • Henry James, Letter to Alice James (April 1, 1913), in Percy Lubbock (ed.) The Letters of Henry James, vol. 2 (1920), p. 206 [49]
  • If there is one mental vice... which sets off the American people from all other folks who walk the earth... it is that of assuming that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that ninety-nine percent of them are wrong.
  • There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. ... The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.
    • Theodore Roosevelt, Speech in New York (October 12, 1915), in Works, Memorial ed., vol. 20 (1925), p. 457
  • Some Americans need hyphens in their names, because only part of them has come over; but when the whole man has come over, heart and thought and all, the hyphen drops of its own weight out of his name.
    • Woodrow Wilson, Address, "Unveiling of the Statue to the Memory of Commodore John Barry", Washington, D.C. (May 16, 1914)
  • Just what is it that America stands for? If she stands for one thing more than another, it is for the sovereignty of self-governing people, and her example, her assistance, her encouragement, has thrilled two continents in this western world with all those fine impulses which have built up human liberty on both sides of the water. She stands, therefore, as an example of independence, as an example of free institutions, and as an example of disinterested international action in the main tenets of justice.
  • We want the spirit of America to be efficient; we want American character to be efficient; we want American character to display itself in what I may, perhaps, be allowed to call spiritual efficiency—clear, disinterested thinking and fearless action along the right lines of thought. America is not anything if it consists of each of us. It is something only if it consists of all of us; and it can consist of all of us only as our spirits are banded together in a common enterprise. That common enterprise is the enterprise of liberty and justice and right. And, therefore, I, for my part, have a great enthusiasm for rendering America spiritually efficient; and that conception lies at the basis of what seems very far removed from it, namely, the plans that have been proposed for the military efficiency of this nation.
  • America can not be an ostrich with its head in the sand.
    • Woodrow Wilson, Speech at Des Moines, Iowa (February 1, 1916), in The New York Times (February 2, 1916), p. 1
  • The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.
    • Woodrow Wilson, Speech to Congress (April 2, 1917), in Selected Addresses (1918), p. 195
  • I believe in the United States of America as a government of the people, by the people, for the people, whose just powers are derived from the consent of the governed; a democracy in a republic; a sovereign Nation of many sovereign States; a perfect Union, one and inseparable, established upon those principles of freedom, equality, justice, and humanity for which American patriots sacrificed their lives and fortunes. I therefore believe it is my duty to my country to love it, to support its Constitution, to obey its laws, to respect its flag, and to defend it against all enemies.
  • We have room but for one Language here and that is the English Language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans of American nationality and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding-house.
    • Theodore Roosevelt, Letter to Charles Steward Davison, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the American Defense Society (January 3, 1919)
  • Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well, that is the way I know I am an American. America, my fellow citizens—I do not say it in disparagement of any other great people—America is the only idealistic Nation in the world.
    • Woodrow Wilson, Speech at Sioux Falls, South Dakota (September 8, 1919), in Messages and Papers (1924), vol. 2, p. 82
  • The bitter, of course, goes with the sweet. To be an American is, unquestionably, to be the noblest, grandest, the proudest mammal that ever hoofed the verdure of God's green footstool. Often, in the black abysm of the night, the thought that I am one awakens me with a blast of trumpets, and I am thrown into a cold sweat by contemplation of the fact. I shall cherish it on the scaffold; it will console me in Hell. But there is no perfection under Heaven, so even an American has his small blemishes, his scarcely discernible weaknesses, his minute traces of vice and depravity.

1920s

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  • America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration.
    • Warren G. Harding, Speech at Boston (May 14, 1920), in Frederick E. Schortemeier, Rededicating America (1920), ch. 17
  • It would surprise no impartial observer if the motto "In God we trust" were one day expunged from the coins of the republic by the Junkers at Washington, and the far more appropriate word, "verboten," substituted. Nor would it astound any save the most romantic if, at the same time, the goddess of liberty were taken off the silver dollars to make room for a bas-relief of a policeman in a spiked helmet.
  • When the world turns completely upside down
    You say we’ll emigrate to the Eastern Shore
    Aboard a river-boat from Baltimore;
    We’ll live among wild peach trees, miles from town,
    You’ll wear a coonskin cap, and I a gown
    Homespun, dyed butternut’s dark gold color.
    Lost, like your lotus-eating ancestor,
    We’ll swim in milk and honey till we drown.
  • In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent business man.
  • The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth. A Galileo could no more be elected President of the United States than he could be elected Pope of Rome.
  • The cry that we have entered upon our imperial course in order to benefit the native populations in the lands that we have conquered is an old one. ... I have before me McKinley's proclamation to the Filipinos, and I have placed it side by side with a proclamation of the King of Assyria, written eighteen hundred years before Christ. A man would think that McKinley had plagiarized the idea from Asshurbanipal. ... Each act of aggression, each new expedition of conquest is prefaced by a pronouncement containing a moral justification and an assurance to the victims of the imperial aggression that all is being done for their benefit.
 
Mom and apple pie
  • New Lestz Suits that are as American as apple pie.
    • Advertisement in the Gettysburg Times (June 3, 1924), p. 6, whence the idiom "as American as mom and apple pie" [50]
  • The strange American ardor for passing laws, the insane belief in regulation and punishment, plays into the hands of the reformers, most of them quacks themselves. Their efforts, even when honest, seldom accomplish any appreciable good. ... Oppressive laws do not destroy minorities; they simply make bootleggers.
  • The Income Tax has made more Liars out of the American people than Golf has. Even when you make one out on the level, you don't know when it's through if you are a Crook or a Martyr.
    • Will Rogers, "Helping the Girls with their Income Taxes", The Illiterate Digest (1924)
  • The chief business of the American people is business.
    • Calvin Coolidge, Speech in Washington, D.C. (January 17, 1925), in The New York Times (January 18, 1925), p. 19
  • In America there are two classes of travel—first class, and with children.
 
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
  • Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
    And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
    Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning —
    So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
  • So I really think that American gentlemen are the best after all, because kissing your hand may make you feel very very good but a diamond and safire bracelet lasts forever.
    • Anita Loos, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925), ch. 4
  • I, too, sing America.
    I am the darker brother.
    They send me to eat in the kitchen
    When company comes,
    But I laugh,
    And eat well,
    And grow strong.
  • “next to of course god america i
    love you land of the pilgrims’ and so forth oh
    say can you see by the dawn’s early my
    country ’tis of centuries come and go
    and are no more what of it we should worry
    in every language even deafanddumb
    thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
    by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
    why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
    iful than these heroic happy dead
    who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
    they did not stop to think they died instead
    then shall the voices of liberty be mute?”
    He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water.
  • The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness. They recognized the significance of man’s spiritual nature, of his feelings, and of his intellect. They knew that only a part of the pain, pleasure, and satisfactions of life are to be found in material things. They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions, and their sensations. They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone—the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.
    • Louis Brandeis, dissenting opinion, Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438 (1928)
  • When the war closed... we were challenged with a peace-time choice between the American system of rugged individualism and a European philosophy of diametrically opposed doctrines—doctrines of paternalism and state socialism.
    • Herbert Hoover, Speech in New York City (October 22, 1928), in New Day (1928) p. 154
  • I'm for the poor man — all poor men, black and white, they all gotta have a chance. They gotta have a home, a job, and a decent education for their children. 'Every man a king' — that's my slogan.
    • Huey Long, quoted in T. Harry Williams, Huey Long (1969), p. 706. The slogan "Every man a king, but no one wears a crown." was written on banners used in the 1928 Louisiana gubernatorial election; see Hugh Davis Graham, Huey Long (1970), p. 39
  • Don't you get the idea I'm one of these goddam radicals. Don't get the idea I'm knocking the American system.
    • Al Capone, Interview (c. 1929), reported in Claud Cockburn, In Time of Trouble (1956), ch. 16

1930s

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America was thus clearly top nation, and History came to a .
  • Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.
    • Sinclair Lewis, "The American Fear of Literature", Nobel Prize Address (December 12, 1930), in H. Frenz, Literature 1901–67 (1969), p. 285
  • "There won’t be any revolution in America," said Isadore. Nikitin agreed. "The people are all too clean. They spend all their time changing their shirts and washing themselves. You can’t feel fierce and revolutionary in a bathroom."
  • I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people. Let us all here assembled constitute ourselves prophets of a new order of competence and of courage. This is more than a political campaign; it is a call to arms. Give me your help, not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people.
    • Franklin D. Roosevelt, Speech to the Democratic Convention in Chicago (July 2, 1932), accepting the presidential nomination; in TIME magazine (July 11, 1932)
  • Failure is not an American habit; and in the strength of great hope we must all shoulder our common load.
  • Another proposal of our opponents which would wholly alter our American system of life is to reduce the protective tariff to a competitive tariff for revenue. ... The grass will grow in the streets of a hundred cities, a thousand towns; the weeds will overrun the fields of millions of farms if that protection be taken away.
    • Herbert Hoover, Speech (October 31, 1932), in State Papers of Herbert Hoover (1934), vol. 2, p. 418
  • I listen to people talking about this universal breakdown we are in and I marvel at their stupid cowardice. It is so obvious that they deliberately cheat themselves because their fear of change won't let them face the truth. They don't want to understand what has happened to them. All they want is to start the merry-go-round of blind greed all over again. They no longer know what they want this country to be, what they want it to become, where they want it to go. It has lost all meaning for them except as pig-wallow. And so their lives as citizens have no beginnings, no ends. They have lost the ideal of the Land of the Free. Freedom demands initiative, courage, the need to decide what life must mean to oneself. To them, that is terror. They explain away their spiritual cowardice by whining that the time for individualism is past, when it is their courage to possess their own souls which is dead — and stinking! No, they don't want to be free. Slavery means security — of a kind, the only kind they have courage for. It means they need not to think. They have only to obey orders from owners who are, in turn, their slaves!
  • We in America should see that no man is ever given, no matter how gradually or how noble and excellent the man, the power to put this country into a war which is now being prepared and brought closer each day with all the pre-meditation of a long planned murder. For when you give power to an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the time of crisis comes.
    • Ernest Hemingway, "Notes on the Next War", in Esquire magazine (September, 1935)
  • In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.
  • Every nation, like every individual, walks in a vain show—else it could not live with itself—but I never got over the wonder of a people who, having extirpated the aboriginals of their continent more completely than any modern race had ever done, honestly believed that they were a godly little New England community, setting examples to brutal mankind.
  • Remember, remember always that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.
    • Franklin D. Roosevelt, remarks before the Daughters of the American Revolution, Washington, D.C. (April 21, 1938), The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1938 (1941), p. 259. FDR is often quoted as having addressed the DAR as "my fellow immigrants." The above words are believed to be the source.
  • God bless America,
    Land that I love,
    Stand beside her and guide her
    Thru the night with a light from above.
    From the mountains to the prairies,
    To the oceans white with foam,
    God bless America,
    My home sweet home.

1940s

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Truth, justice and the American way
  • Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings at a single bound! Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Superman! Yes, it’s Superman! Strange visitor from another planet, who came to earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men. Superman! Who can change the course of mighty rivers, bend steel with his bare hands, and who—disguised as Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper—fights a never ending battle for truth, justice and the American way!
  • I am American bred,
    I have seen much to hate here—much to forgive,
    But in a world where England is finished and dead,
    I do not wish to live.
  • It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the rollercoaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or the country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.
    • Carson McCullers, "Look Homeward, Americans", in Vogue magazine (December 1940), collected in The Mortgaged Heart (1971)
 
That is no vision of a distant millennium. —FDR
  • In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
    The first is freedom of speech, and expression—everywhere in the world.
    The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world.
    The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world.
    The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.
    That is no vision of a distant millennium.
  • We are a nation of many nationalities, many races, many religions, bound together by a single unity, the unity of freedom and equality. Whoever seeks to set one nationality against another, seeks to degrade all nationalities. Whoever seeks to set one race against another seeks to enslave all races. Whoever seeks to set one religion against another, seeks to destroy all religion.
    • Franklin D. Roosevelt, campaign address, Brooklyn, New York (November 1, 1940); The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1940 (1941), p. 53
  • Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live on in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.
  • The land was ours before we were the land’s.
    She was our land more than a hundred years
    Before we were her people. ...
    But we were England’s, still colonials,
    Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
    Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
  • Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
    (The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
    To the land vaguely realizing westward,
    But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
    Such as she was, such as she would become.
  • The democracy of Lincoln is not dead. It has not lost its revolutionary fervor. It has not lost its appeal to the men of the world. Our problem is to prove that we really believe in it.
  • Either you believe in liberty, justice, and right, or you do not. If you do, then our appeal to the revolutionary spirit of the world will be heard, but if you do not, all the Atlantic Charters in the world will not inspire the conquered nations to fight for principles that we proclaim but do not follow.
  • Whoever is fortunate enough to be an American citizen came into the greatest inheritance man has ever enjoyed. He has had the benefit of every heroic and intellectual effort men have made for many thousands of years, realized at last. If Americans should now turn back, submit again to slavery, it would be a betrayal so base the human race might better perish.
  • As I went walking that ribbon of highway
    And I saw above me that endless skyway,
    I saw below me that golden valley:
    This land was made for you and me.
  • There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me
    A sign was painted, said: Private Property,
    But on the back side it didn’t say nothing:
    This land was made for you and me.
  • This land is your land ’n this land is my land,
    From California to the New York island,
    From the redwood forest, to the gulf stream waters:
    This land was made for you and me.
  • Men, all this stuff you hear about America not wanting to fight, wanting to stay out of the war, is a lot of horse dung. Americans love to fight. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle. When you were kids, you all admired the champion marble shooter, the fastest runner, the big-league ball players and the toughest boxers. Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost, and laughed. That's why Americans have never lost and will never lose a war. The very thought of losing is hateful to America.
  • The constitution does not provide for first and second class citizens.
  • Yes, movies! Look at them — All of those glamorous people — having adventures — hogging it all, gobbling the whole thing up! You know what happens? People go to the movies instead of moving! Hollywood characters are supposed to have all the adventures for everybody in America, while everybody in America sits in a dark room and watches them have them! Yes, until there's a war. That's when adventure becomes available to the masses! Everyone's dish, not only Gable's! Then the people in the dark room come out of the dark room to have some adventures themselves — Goody, goody! — It's our turn now, to go to the south Sea Island — to make a safari — to be exotic, far-off! — But I'm not patient. I don't want to wait till then. I'm tired of the movies and I am about to move!
  • If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.
    • Harry S. Truman, White House Press Release Announcing the Bombing of Hiroshima (August 6, 1945); this announcement was based largely on a draft of July 31, by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson
  • All the arts in America are a gigantic racket run by unscrupulous men for unhealthy women.
 
For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863... —William Faulkner
  • It's all now you see. Yesterday won't be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago. For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it's going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago; or to anyone who ever sailed a skiff under a quilt sail, the moment in 1492 when somebody thought This is it: the absolute edge of no return, to turn back now and make home or sail irrevocably on and either find land or plunge over the world's roaring rim.
  • They told me, Francis Hinsley, they told me you were hung
    With red protruding eye-balls and black protruding tongue.
    I wept as I remembered how often you and I
    Had laughed about Los Angeles and now ’tis here you’ll lie;
    Here pickled in formaldehyde and painted like a whore,
    Shrimp-pink incorruptible, not lost nor gone before.
  • Americans are conceited enough to believe they are the only fools in the world.
    • George Bernard Shaw (d. 1950), quoted in Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw: The Lure of Fantasy (1991)
  • England and America are two countries separated by a common language.
    • Attributed to Shaw [54]

1950s

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  • What happens to a dream deferred?
    Does it dry up
    like a raisin in the sun?
    Or fester like a sore—
    And then run?
    Does it stink like rotten meat?
    Or crust and sugar over—
    like a syrupy sweet?
    Maybe it just sags
    like a heavy load.
    Or does it explode?
  • When liberty is headlong girl
    And runs her roads and wends her ways
    Liberty will shriek and whirl
    Her showery torch to see it blaze.
    When liberty is wedded wife
    And keeps the barn and counts the byre
    Liberty amends her life.
    She drowns her torch for fear of fire.
  • America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain. ... Our fate is to become one, and yet many—This is not prophecy, but description.
  • McCarthyism is Americanism with its sleeves rolled.
    • Joseph McCarthy, Speech in Wisconsin (1952), in Richard Rovere Senator Joe McCarthy (1973), p. 8
  • I do not like subversion or disloyalty in any form and if I had ever seen any I would have considered it my duty to have reported it to the proper authorities. But to hurt innocent people whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself is to me inhuman and indecent and dishonorable. I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions, even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group.
    • Lillian Hellman, Letter to John S. Wood (May 19, 1952), in U.S. Congress Committee Hearing on Un-American Activities (1952) pt. 8, p. 3546
  • Let's face it. Let's talk sense to the American people. Let's tell them the truth, that there are no gains without pains, that we are now on the eve of great decisions, not easy decisions, like resistance when you're attacked, but a long, patient, costly struggle which alone can assure triumph over the great enemies of man—war, poverty and tyranny—and the assaults upon human dignity which are the most grievous consequences of each.
    • Adlai Stevenson II, Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois (July 26, 1952), in Speeches of Adlai Stevenson (1952), p. 20 [55]
  • In America any boy may become President and I suppose it's just one of the risks he takes!
    • Adlai Stevenson II, Speech in Indianapolis (September 26, 1952), in Major Campaign Speeches of Adlai E. Stevenson; 1952 (1953), p. 174
  • All colors and blends of Americans have somewhat the same tendencies. It's a breed — selected out by accident. And so we're overbrave and overfearful — we're kind and cruel as children. We're overfriendly and at the same time frightened of strangers. We boast and are impressed. We're oversentimental and realistic. We are mundane and materialistic — and do you know of any other nation that acts for ideals? We eat too much. We have no taste, no sense of proportion. We throw our energy about like waste. In the old lands they say of us that we go from barbarism to decadence without an intervening culture.
  • Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
    • Dwight D. Eisenhower, Speech in Washington, D.C. (April 16, 1953), in Public Papers of Presidents: 1953 (1960), p. 182
  • We are the first victims of American Fascism.
    • Julius Rosenberg, Letter to Emanuel Bloch while awaiting execution (June 19, 1953); in Ethel Rosenberg, Testament of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (1954), p. 187
  • In the United States... a handful of corporations centralize decisions and responsibilities that are relevant for military and political as well as economic developments of global significance. For nowadays the military and the political cannot be separated from economic considerations of power. We now live not in an economic order or a political order, but in a political economy that is closely linked with military institutions and decisions. This is obvious in the repeated "oil crisis" in the Middle East, or in the relevance of Southeast Asia and African resources for the Western powers...
  • The largest cultural menace in America is the conformity of the intellectual cliques which, in education as well as the arts, are out to impose upon the nation their modish fads and fallacies, and have nearly succeeded in doing so.
  • I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
    dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
    angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.
  • America – a conservative country without any conservative ideology – appears now before the world a naked and arbitrary power, as, in the name of realism, its men of decision enforce their often crackpot definitions upon world reality. The second-rate mind is in command of the ponderously spoken platitude. In the liberal rhetoric, vagueness, and in the conservative mood, irrationality, are raised to principle. Public relations and the official secret, the trivializing campaign and the terrible fact clumsily accomplished, are replacing the reasoned debate of political ideas in the privately incorporated economy, the military ascendancy, and the political vacuum of modern America.
  • The American elite does not have any real image of peace — other than as an uneasy interlude existing precariously by virtue of the balance of mutual fright. The only seriously accepted plan for peace is the full loaded pistol. In short, war or a high state of war-preparedness is felt to be the normal and seemingly permanent condition of the United States.
  • If we Americans are to survive it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to be first of all Americans; to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green. Maybe the purpose of this sorry and tragic error committed in my native Mississippi by two white adults on an afflicted Negro child is to prove to us whether or not we deserve to survive. Because if we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive, and probably won't.
  • The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children.
  • I am a free man, an American, a United States Senator, and a Democrat, in that order.
  • America has been called a melting pot, but it seems better to call it a mosaic, for in it each nation, people, or race which has come to its shores has been privileged to keep its individuality, contributing at the same time its share to the unified pattern of a new nation.
  • Before he could go to New York he had to get a U.S. visa at the American consulate in Toronto. He was called upon to fill in a long form with many questions, including "Is it your intention to overthrow the Government of the United States by force?" By the time Harding got to that one he was so irritated that he answered: "Sole purpose of visit."
    • Gilbert Harding (d. 1960), as quoted in W. Reyburn, Gilbert Harding (1978) ch. 2
  • America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.

1960s

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  • To make America the greatest is my goal,
    So I beat the Russian, and I beat the Pole,
    And for the USA won the Medal of Gold.
    Italians said, "You're greater than the Cassius of Old."
    We like your name, we like your game,
    So make Rome your home if you will.
    I said I appreciate kind hospitality,
    But the USA is my country still,
    'Cause they waiting to welcome me in Louisville.
    • Muhammad Ali (then Cassius Clay), "How Cassius Took Rome", poem written after winning the light heavyweight gold medal at the 1960 Summer Olympics, in The Greatest (1975), pt. 2
  • This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. ... We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. ... In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
  • In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility—I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it—and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.
    And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.
    My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.
  • I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. ... But in a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon — if we make this judgment affirmatively, it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there.
  • The immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof.
    • Mary McCarthy, "America the Beautiful", in On the Contrary (1961)
  • Standing to America, bringing home
    black gold, black ivory, black seed.
  • Deep in the festering hold thy father lies,
    of his bones New England pews are made,
    those are altar lights that were his eyes.
  • In our flag the barriers of time and space vanish. All America that ever was and ever will be lives every moment in our flag. Wherever in the world two or three of us stand together under our flag, all America is there.
  • Americans... are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier.
  • O grave, where is thy victory? Where, indeed. Many a badly stung survivor, faced with the aftermath of some relative’s funeral, has ruefully concluded that the victory has been won hands down by a funeral establishment.
 
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. —MLK
  • Now, I say to you today my friends, even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed:—"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."
    I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
    I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the people's injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
    I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
  • And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania. Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado. Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California. But not only that: Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia. Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee. Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.
  • We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. We have talked for a hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law.
    • Lyndon B. Johnson, Speech to Congress (November 27, 1963), in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson 1963–64, vol. 1, p. 9
  • I'm not going to sit at your table and watch you eat, with nothing on my plate, and call myself a diner. Sitting at the table doesn't make you a diner, unless you eat some of what's on that plate. Being here in America doesn't make you an American. Being born here in America doesn't make you an American. ... No, I’m not an American. I’m one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the 22 million black people who are the victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy.
  • If this is a country of freedom, let it be a country of freedom; and if it's not a country of freedom, change it.
    • Malcolm X, "The Ballot or the Bullet", Speech in Cleveland, Ohio (April 3, 1964)
  • In your time we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.
    • Lyndon B. Johnson, Speech at University of Michigan (May 22, 1964), in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson 1963–64, vol. 1, p. 704
  • We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.
    • Lyndon B. Johnson, Speech at Akron University (October 21, 1964), in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson 1963–64, vol. 2, p. 1391
  • It is always and forever the same struggle: to perceive somehow our own complicity with evil is a horror not to be borne. ... much more reassuring to see the world in terms of totally innocent victims and totally evil instigators of the monstrous violence we see all about us. At all costs, never disturb our innocence. But what is the most innocent place in any country? Is it not the insane asylum? These people drift through life truly innocent, unable to see into themselves at all. The perfection of innocence, indeed, is madness.
    • Arthur Miller, "With respect for Her Agony — but with Love", in LIFE magazine (February 7, 1964)
  • America represents herself as a Christian nation. ... They profess to be a friend and defenders of all peace-loving and freedom-loving people. The only people we really see that they want to be friends of are themselves and their kind. They are really sincere when they say that they are freedom-loving people. Above all, the White man the world over wants to be free to rule and dominate the aboriginal people.
  • One out of three hundred and twelve Americans is a bore, for instance, and a healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people’s patience.
    • John Updike, "Confessions of a Wild Bore", in Assorted Prose (1965); cf. Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, "Dullard, n."
  • There are two Americas. One is the America of Lincoln and Adlai Stevenson; the other is the America of Teddy Roosevelt and the modern superpatriots. One is generous and humane, the other narrowly egotistical; one is self-critical, the other self-righteous; one is sensible, the other romantic; one is good-humored, the other solemn; one is inquiring, the other pontificating; one is moderate, the other filled with passionate intensity; one is judicious and the other arrogant in the use of great power.
  • America's abundance was created not by public sacrifices to the common good, but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America's industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages, and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance — and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way.
  • Businessmen are the one group that distinguishes capitalism and the American way of life from the totalitarian statism that is swallowing the rest of the world. All the other social groups – workers, farmers, professional men, scientists, soldiers – exist under dictatorships, even though they exist in chains, in terror, in misery, and in progressive self-destruction. But there is no such group as businessmen under a dictatorship. Their place is taken by armed thugs: by bureaucrats and commissars. Businessmen are the symbol of a free society, the symbol of America.
  • Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation's troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen.
    • Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966)
 
This nation has been like an octopus of exploitation, its tentacles stretching from Mississippi and Harlem to South America, the Middle East, southern Africa, and Vietnam.
—Stokely Carmichael
  • Ultimately, the economic foundations of this country must be shaken if black people are to control their lives. The colonies of the United States—and this includes the black ghettoes within its borders, north and south—must be liberated. For a century, this nation has been like an octopus of exploitation, its tentacles stretching from Mississippi and Harlem to South America, the Middle East, southern Africa, and Vietnam; the form of exploitation varies from area to area but the essential result has been the same—a powerful few have been maintained and enriched at the expense of the poor and voiceless colored masses. This pattern must be broken.
  • I say violence is necessary. It is as American as cherry pie.
    • H. Rap Brown, Speech at Washington, D.C. (July 27, 1967), in The Washington Post (July 28, 1967) [60]
  • In the five centuries since Columbus discovered the New World, savagery has been part of American life. There has been the violence of conquest and resistance, the violence of racial difference, the violence of civil war, the violence of bandits and gangsters, the violence of lynch law, all set against the violence of the wilderness and the city.
  • Here we are the way politics ought to be in America, the politics of happiness, the politics of purpose and the politics of joy.
    • Hubert Humphrey, Speech in Washington, D.C. (April 27, 1968), in The New York Times (April 28, 1968), p. 66 [61]
  • And here we are, just as we ought to be, here we are, the people, here we are in a spirit of dedication, here we are the way politics ought to be in America, the politics of happiness, the politics of purpose and the politics of joy.
    • Hubert Humphrey, Speech in Washington, D.C. (April 27, 1968), in The New York Times (April 28, 1968), p. 66
  • The greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker. This honor now beckons America — the chance to help lead the world at last out of the valley of turmoil, and onto that high ground of peace that man has dreamed of since the dawn of civilization. If we succeed, generations to come will say of us now living that we mastered our moment, that we helped make the world safe for mankind.
  • The most profound breach in this country is not between the rich and the poor, but between the people and the intellectuals. In their view of life, the American people are predominantly Apollonian. The mainstream intellectuals are Dionysian. This means the people are reality-oriented, common sense-oriented, technology-oriented. The intellectuals call this "materialistic," and "middle-class." The intellectuals are emotion-oriented, and seek in panic an escape from a reality they are unable to deal with, and from a technological civilization that ignores their feelings.
  • Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue, the monograph went on. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times.
    • Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), ch. 5
 
The Eagle has landed.

1970s

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  • There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual and with culture, and it will change the political structure only as its final act.
  • In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism.
  • It is time for the great silent majority of Americans to stand up and be counted.
    • Richard Nixon, Election speech (October, 1970), in The New York Times (October 21, 1970) [64]
  • Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only real cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas. To relax, as it were, in the womb of the desert sun. Just roll the roof back and screw it on, grease the face with white tanning butter and move out with the music at top volume, and at least a pint of ether.
 
I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour…certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was.
  • It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run... but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant...
    History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of 'history' it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
    My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights — or very early mornings — when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour... booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turnoff to take when I got to the other end... but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: no doubt at all about that...
    There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda... You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning...
    And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...
    So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes, you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
  • Try to tell a Russian housewife, who trudges miles on foot in sub-zero weather in order to spend hours standing in line at a state store dispensing food rations, that America is defiled by shopping centers, expressways and family cars.
    • Ayn Rand, The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1971), p. 88
  • No power on earth is stronger than the United States of America today. And none will be stronger than the United States of America in the future.
    • Richard Nixon, Address to a Joint Session of the Congress on Return From Austria, the Soviet Union, Iran, and Poland (June 1, 1972) [65]
  • O Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain,
    For strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain.
    America, America, man sheds his waste on thee,
    And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.
  • So we think of Marilyn who was every man’s love affair with America, Marilyn Monroe who was blonde and beautiful and had a sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the cleanliness of all the clean American backyards.
  • The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
    • Henry Kissinger, as quoted in The Washington Post (December 23, 1973); he later joked further on this remark, on 10 March 1975 saying to Turkish Foreign Minister Melih Esenbel in Ankara, Turkey:
      Before the Freedom of Information Act, I used to say at meetings, "The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer." [laughter] But since the Freedom of Information Act, I’m afraid to say things like that. [66] [67]
  • My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a Government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule.
    • Gerald Ford, Speech (August 9, 1974), in G. J. Lankevich, Gerald R. Ford (1977)
  • This country needs good farmers, good businessmen, good plumbers, good carpenters.
    • Richard Nixon, Farewell Address at the White House (August 9, 1974), cited in The New York Times (August 10, 1974), p. 4
  • The American condition can be summed up in three sentences we're hearing these days:
       "Your check is in the mail."
       "I will respect you as much in the morning."
       "I am from the government and I am here to help you."
  • We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.
    • Jimmy Carter, Speech, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (October 27, 1976)
  • I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system. State censorship is not necessary, or even very efficient, in comparison to the ideological controls exercised by systems that are more complex and more decentralized.
  • We have the heaviest concentration of lawyers on Earth—1 for every 500 Americans, three times as many as are in England, four times as many as are in West Germany, twenty-one times as many as there are in Japan. We have more litigation, but I am not sure that we have more justice. No resources of talent and training in our own society, even including the medical care, is more wastefully or unfairly distributed than legal skills. Ninety percent of our lawyers serve 10 percent of our people. We are over-lawyered and under-represented.
    • Jimmy Carter, Remarks at the 100th Anniversary Luncheon of the Los Angeles County Bar Association, Los Angeles, California (May 4, 1978)
  • Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men's reality. Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of 'the rat race' is not yet final.

1980s

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  • I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past's fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.
    • Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States (1980), ch. 1
  • I found that many Americans did not even know that a country named Iran existed, let alone what it was like. Even among the diplomatic corps and among well-educated people, there was a vagueness about who the Iranians were or what the culture was, a tendency to confuse Iran with Iraq or to mistakenly assume that Iran is an Arab country simply because it is an Islamic nation. This fuzziness about the world outside is unique to America; among the intelligensia of European countries... there is generally a higher level of awareness and information regarding cultures other than their own.
  • "Petersburg socialism seems cold to the likes of our Cossacks, who would rather worship personalities than embrace ideas."
    I shared his irony. "You make them sound like Americans."
  • I can say, not as a patriotic bromide, but with full knowledge of the necessary metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, political, and aesthetic roots, that the United States of America is the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world.
  • The trouble with these people is
    that their cities have never been
    bombed and their mothers have never
    been told to shut up.
  • What I try to tell you? This country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the woman. That's why you gotta make your own moves.
  • Our flag is red, white, and blue, but our nation is a rainbow—red, yellow, brown, black, and white—and all are precious in God’s sight. America is not like a blanket—one piece of unbroken cloth, the same color, the same texture, the same size. It is more like a quilt—many patches, many pieces, many colors, and many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread.
    • Jesse Jackson, Address to the Democratic National Convention, San Francisco, California (July 17, 1984)
  • Good night, you Princes of Maine—you Kings of New England!
  • We current Justices read the Constitution in the only way that we can: as Twentieth Century Americans. We look to the history of the time of framing and to the intervening history of interpretation. But the ultimate question must be, what do the words of the text mean in our time. For the genius of the Constitution rests not in any static meaning it might have had in a world that is dead and gone, but in the adaptability of its great principles to cope with current problems and current needs.
    • William J. Brennan Jr., "The Constitution of the United States: Contemporary Ratification", Speech, Washington, D.C. (October 12, 1985)
  • I never use the words Democrats and Republicans. It's liberals and Americans.
    • James G. Watt, statement (November, 1981), quoted in The New York Times (October 10, 1983); also quoted in Energy and Environment: The Unfinished Business (Congressional Quarterly, Inc., 1986), p. 91
  • These students will assiduously study economics or the professions and the Michael Jackson costume will slip off to reveal a Brooks Brothers suit beneath. They will want to get ahead and live comfortably. But this life is as empty and false as the one they left behind. The choice is not between quick fixes and dull calculation. This is what liberal education is meant to show them. But as long as they have the Walkman on, they cannot hear what the great tradition has to say. And, after its prolonged use, when they take it off, they find they are deaf.
  • Blood that has soaked into the sands of a beach is all of one color. America stands unique in the world, the only country not founded on race but on a way, an ideal. Not in spite of but because of our polyglot background, we have had all the strength in the world. That is the American way.
    • Ronald Reagan, Remarks on signing the Bill Providing Restitution for the Wartime Internment of Japanese-American Civilians (August 10, 1988), quoting himself at the funeral of Kazuo Masuda (December, 1945) [69]

1990s

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  • If those in charge of our society — politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television — can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.
    • Howard Zinn, Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology (1991)
  • The American political system is like a gigantic Mexican Christmas fiesta. Each political party is a huge piñata — a papier-mâché donkey, for example. The donkey is filled with full employment, low interest rates, affordable housing, comprehensive medical benefits, a balanced budget and other goodies. The American voter is blindfoled and given a stick. The voter then swings the stick wildly in every direction, trying to hit a political candidate on the head and knock some sense into the silly bastard.
  • In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.
  • We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot subculture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.
  • We've gotten to where we've nearly them'ed ourselves to death. Them and them and them. But this is America. There is no them; there's only us. One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
    • Bill Clinton, "A Place Called Hope", Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Democratic National Convention in New York (July 16, 1992) [71]
  • ... those who view the history of North America as a narrative of genocide and slavery are, it seems to me, hopelessly stuck on this reactionary position. They can think of the Western expansion of the United States only in terms of plague blankets, bootleg booze and dead buffalo, never in terms of the medicine chest, the wheel and the railway.
  • The transformation of part of the northern part of this continent into "America" inaugurated a nearly boundless epoch of opportunity and innovation, and thus deserves to be celebrated with great vim and gusto, with or without the participation of those who wish they had never been born.
  • Go back to bed, America. Your government has figured out how it all transpired. Go back to bed, America. Your government is in control again. Here. Here's American Gladiators. Watch this, shut up. Go back to bed, America. Here is American Gladiators. Here is 56 channels of it! Watch these pituitary retards bang their fucking skulls together and congratulate you on living in the land of freedom. Here you go, America! You are free to do as we tell you! You are free to do what we tell you!
  • Individuals who have been wronged by unlawful racial discrimination should be made whole; but under our Constitution there can be no such thing as either a creditor or a debtor race. ... To pursue the concept of racial entitlement – even for the most admirable and benign of purposes – is to reinforce and preserve for future mischief the way of thinking that produced race slavery, race privilege and race hatred. In the eyes of government, we are just one race here. It is American.
  • Americans need bullshit the way koala bears need eucalyptus leaves. They’ve become totally addicted to it. They get so much of it back home that they can’t survive without it.
  • The works and prayers of centuries
       Have brought us to this day...
    What shall be our legacy?
       What will our children say?...
    Let me know in my heart,
       When my days are through,
    America, America,
       I gave my best to you.
  • America has never been an empire. We may be the only great power in history that had the chance, and refused; preferring greatness to power and justice to glory.
    • George W. Bush, Speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, California (November 19, 1999) [74]
  • The American people like their bullshit right out front where they can get a good, strong whiff of it.

21st century

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2000s

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  • The power of the United States depended heavily on its pale empire of ideas, attitudes and innovations. Its ideas alighted effortlessly on foreign ground, irrespective of who owned the ground. Much of its influence came from such innovations as the telephone, electricity, aircraft and the cheap car, nuclear weapons and spacecraft, computers and the Internet. Its influence came through jazz, cartoons, Hollywood, television and popular culture. Its influence came from an excitement about technology and economic change, and a belief in incentives and individual enterprise. It was also the most ardent missionary for the creed of democracy. While military and economic might was vital to the success of the United States, the power of its pale empire of ideas was probably even more pervasive.
  • If we're an arrogant nation, they'll resent us. If we're a humble nation, but strong, they'll welcome us. We've got to be humble.
 
For those thousands in the south tower, the second plane meant the end of everything. For us, its glint was the worldflash of a coming future.
—Martin Amis
  • It was the advent of the second plane, sharking in low over the Statue of Liberty: that was the defining moment. Until then, America thought she was witnessing nothing more serious than the worst aviation disaster in history; now she had a sense of the fantastic vehemence ranged against her. ... For those thousands in the south tower, the second plane meant the end of everything. For us, its glint was the worldflash of a coming future.
  • It was the morning of April 20, 1999, and it was pretty much like any other morning in America. The farmer did his chores. The milkman made his deliveries. The President bombed another country whose name we couldn't pronounce. Out in Fargo, North Dakota, Cary McWilliams went on his morning walk. Back in Michigan, Mrs Hughes welcomed her students for another day of school. And out in a little town in Colorado, two boys went bowling at 6 in the morning. Yes, it was a typical day in the United States of America.
  • Baghdad is determined to force the Mongols of our age to commit suicide at its gates.
  • What the immigrant cannot help noticing is that America is a country where the poor live comparatively well. This fact was dramatized in the 1980s, when CBS television broadcast an anti-Reagan documentary, "People Like Us", which was intended to show the miseries of the poor during an American recession. The Soviet Union also broadcast the documentary, with a view to embarrassing the Reagan administration. But by the testimony of former Soviet leaders, it had the opposite effect. Ordinary people across the Soviet Union saw that the poorest Americans have television sets and microwave ovens and cars. They arrived at the same perception of America that I witnessed in a friend of mine from Bombay who has been unsuccessfully trying to move to the United States for nearly a decade. Finally I asked him, "Why are you so eager to come to America?" He replied, "Because I really want to live in a country where the poor people are fat."
  • If the presidency is the head of the American body politic, Congress is its gastrointestinal tract. Its vast and convoluted inner workings may be mysterious and unpleasant, but in the end they excrete a great deal of material whose successful passage is crucial to our nation's survival.
  • A free and independent press is essential to the health of a functioning democracy. It serves to inform the voting public on matters relevant to its well-being. Why they've stopped doing that is a mystery. I mean, 300 camera crews outside a courthouse to see what Kobe Bryant is wearing when the judge sets his hearing date, while false information used to send our country to war goes unchecked? What the fuck happened?
  • Wherever there's injustice, oppression, and suffering, America will show up six months late and bomb the country next to where it's happening.
  • Everything's bigger in America. We've got the biggest cars, the biggest houses, the biggest companies, the biggest food, and finally: the biggest people. America has now become the fattest nation in the world. Congratulations!
  • Happily for the busy lunatics who rule over us, we are permanently the United States of Amnesia. We learn nothing because we remember nothing.
  • We're all living in Amerika.
    Amerika ist wunderbar.
  • McDonald's (Fuck yeah!) Walmart (Fuck yeah!) The Gap (Fuck yeah!) Baseball (Fuck yeah!) NFL (Fuck yeah!) Rock and roll (Fuck yeah!) The Internet (Fuck yeah!) Slavery (Fuck yeah!) ... Starbucks (Fuck yeah!) Disney World (Fuck yeah!) Porno (Fuck yeah!) Valium (Fuck yeah!) Reeboks (Fuck yeah!) Fake tits (Fuck yeah!) Sushi (Fuck yeah!) Taco Bell (Fuck yeah!) Rodeos (Fuck yeah!) Bed, Bath & Beyond (Fuck yeah, fuck yeah!) Liberty (Fuck yeah!) Wax lips (Fuck yeah!) The Alamo (Fuck yeah!) Band-aids (Fuck yeah!) Las Vegas (Fuck yeah!) Christmas (Fuck yeah!) Immigrants (Fuck yeah!) Popeye (Fuck yeah!) Democrats (Fuck yeah!) Republicans (Fuck yeah, fuck yeah) Sportsmanship... Books...
  • Smoke all night, sleep all day
    That's the epitome of the American way.
  • Stand tall for the beast of America.
    Lay down like a naked dead body,
    Keep it real for the people workin' overtime,
    They can't stay living off the government's dime.
    • Nico Vega, "Beast", chooseyourwordspoorly (2006)
  • [W]hen you're born in this world, you're given a ticket to the freak show. And when you're born in America, you're given a front row seat.
  • In the United States, minority populations were never an indigestible mass—with the major exceptions of the one ethnic group that did not come here voluntarily (African Americans) and those who were here when Europeans arrived (American Indians). The rest all came, clustered and dispersed, and added new cultural layers to the general society. This has always been the strength of the United States.
    • George Friedman, The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (New York: Doubleday, 2009), pp. 224–5
  • Americans still admire dignity. But the word has become un-moored from any larger set of rules or ethical system.

2010s

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The essence of U.S. military predominance in the world is, ultimately, the fact that it can, at will, drop bombs, with only a few hours' notice, at absolutely any point on the surface of the planet.
—David Graeber
  • The essence of U.S. military predominance in the world is, ultimately, the fact that it can, at will, drop bombs, with only a few hours' notice, at absolutely any point on the surface of the planet. No other government has ever had anything remotely like this sort of capability. In fact, a case could well be made that it is this very power that holds the entire world monetary system, organized around the dollar, together.
  • Occupy Wall Street
    • Left-wing populist movement against economic inequality, corporate greed, big finance, and the influence of money in politics that began in Zuccotti Park, located in New York City's Financial District, and lasted for fifty-nine days (September 17 – November 15, 2011)
  • In the city of New York the banks tower above the cathedrals. Banks are the temples of the United States. This is a holy war. Our economy is our religion.
  • When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people. But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we're getting. And it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. They're sending us not the right people. It's coming from more than Mexico. It's coming from all over South and Latin America, and it's coming probably – probably – from the Middle East. But we don't know. Because we have no protection and we have no competence, we don't know what's happening. And it's got to stop and it's got to stop fast.
    • Donald Trump, Presidential Bid Announcement, at Trump Tower, Manhattan (June 16, 2015), in The Washington Post (June 16, 2015) [77]
  • We are America. Second to none. And we own the finish line.
    • Joe Biden, Democratic National Convention Speech (July 27, 2016) [78]
  • The United States has the highest inequality of the richest nations. It has the highest incarceration rate by far. It has among the highest child mortality rates. It has the highest youth poverty rate. It has one of the lowest levels of voter registration in the rich countries. In essence, it scores extremely poorly on almost all of the comparative measures when compared with other developed states. I visited China on one of these missions about a year ago and what I found was a country that has huge problems in terms of human rights, but in terms of extreme poverty, has made an absolutely concerted and genuine attempt to eliminate poverty and has succeeded to an important extent. By 2020, they will in fact have no one living in extreme poverty, unlike the United States. While I don’t for a minute want to suggest that the political system [in China] is desirable or even compatible with democratic standards, I would very much welcome an American government that shows a determination to lift everyone out of extreme poverty. I think that’s what politics should be all about, and it’s not happening in the United States.

2020s

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  • American labor was strongest when the threat of communism was greatest. The apogee of America's welfare state, with all its limitations, was coterminous with the height of the Cold War. The dismantling of the welfare state and the labor movement, meanwhile, marched in tandem with communism's collapse.
    • Gary Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era (2022), p. 12
  • Since it gained independence in 1776, the United States has constantly sought expansion by force: it slaughtered Indians, invaded Canada, waged a war against Mexico, instigated the American-Spanish War, and annexed Hawaii. After World War II, the wars either provoked or launched by the United States included the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the Kosovo War, the War in Afghanistan, the Iraq War, the Libyan War and the Syrian War, abusing its military hegemony to pave the way for expansionist objectives. In recent years, the U.S. average annual military budget has exceeded 700 billion U.S. dollars, accounting for 40 percent of the world’s total, more than the 15 countries behind it combined. The United States has about 800 overseas military bases, with 173,000 troops deployed in 159 countries.
  • Those who have amassed the most power and capital bear the most responsibility for America's vast poverty: political elites, who have utterly failed low-income Americans over the past century; corporate bosses who have spent and schemed to prioritize profits over people; lobbyists blocking the will of the American people with their self-serving interests; property owners who have exiled the poor from entire cities and fueled the affordable housing crisis.

See also

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