Colonial United States Quotes

We have been gradually finding out that there is more democracy in letting a committee or representative ten to details than in making everybody's business nobody's business. ~ Edward Pearson Pressey

New Englanders began the Revolution not to institute reforms and changes in the order of things, but to save the institutions and customs that already had become old and venerable with them; and were new only to a few stupid Englishmen a hundred and fifty years behind the times. ~ Edward Pearson Pressey

The important point of this report [Montague, Massachusetts; July 7, 1774] may be summed up in six resolutions: 1. We approve of the plan for a Continental Congress September 1, at Philadelphia. 2. We urge the disuse of India teas and British goods. 3. We will act for the suppression of pedlers and petty chapmen (supposably vendors of dutiable wares). 4. And work to promote American manufacturing. 5. We ought to relieve Boston. 6. We appoint the 14th day of July, a day of humiliation and prayer. ~ Edward Pearson Pressey

If we are to meet the growing electricity demand in the United States without significantly increasing emissions of greenhouse gases, we must maintain a diverse supply of electricity, and nuclear power must be part of that mix. ~ Judy Biggert

I'm not looking to be anyone's vice president. I looking to be the president of the United States. Or, I'll be a private citizen, there's nothing wrong with being a private citizen. ~ Marco Rubio

About 2500 years ago Aeschylus, the Greek playwright, wrote, He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God. These remarkable photos and the stories that accompany them should be on billboards from sea to shining sea, so the pain and suffering they represent might fall drop by drop upon the American psyche and against our will, by the awful grace of God, wisdom might come to these United States and her foreign policy. ~ Gioconda Belli

When you're the president of the United States and you know that the biggest issue facing you is this cliff that we're about ready to head over if we don't get this spending and debt situation under control, it's very irresponsible not to take the action that is necessary to fix the problem. ~ John Thune

Almost every peace process that has gone on between the Arab side and Israel, the United States has been somewhat isolated because most of the countries in the world, what they really want is to accept the Arab peace plan or so-called peace plan, which in its present form would lead to the destruction of Israel. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

To hold that Congress has general police power would be to hold that it may accomplish objects not intrusted to the general government, and to defeat the operation of the 10th Amendment, declaring that 'the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people. ~ Melville Fuller

For the past decade, U.S. generals have dominated the military effort against the insurgency. Washington has chosen Afghanistan's leaders. Americans have conceived, planned, financed, and overseen economic projects in which Afghans have played only supporting roles. And yet there has never been a possibility that the United States and its allies could win the war against the Taliban. Only Afghans themselves can do that. ~ Anonymous

It is an abuse of power, when you are President of the United States, to use the White House to single out a single news organization, and castigate them and try to delegitimize them. ~ Monica Crowley

Saskatchewan is much like Texas - except it's more friendly to the United States. ~ Adlai Stevenson

The first case of mad cow disease since 2006 was discovered right here in the United States. The good news, since the cow is in California, instead of putting the cow down, they are going to enroll him in anger management classes. ~ Jay Leno

The United States has done some very good things in the world, and that does not change the fact that the World Court was quite correct in condemning the United States as an international terrorist state. ~ Noam Chomsky

In American terms, the accomplishment of Genghis Khan might be understood if the United States, instead of being created by a group of educated merchants or wealthy planters, had been founded by one of its illiterate slaves, who, by sheer force of personality, charisma, and determination, liberated America from foreign rule, united the people, created an alphabet, wrote the constitution, established universal religious freedom, invented a new system of warfare, marched an army from Canada to Brazil, and opened roads of commerce in a free-trade zone that stretched across the continents. ~ Jack Weatherford

The Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation. ~ John McCain

The United States succeeded by State action in prohibiting the slave-trade from 1798 to 1803, in furthering the cause of abolition, and in preventing the fitting out of slave-trade expeditions in United States ports. The country had good cause to congratulate itself. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

In the leadup to the election of 1876, swing votes were tied to the issue of Chinese immigration in the same way that immigration was a hot topic during this election cycle. Rutherford Hayes endorsed Chinese exclusion and won the election. In the following election, James Garfield also carried the torch of anti-Chinese immigration into office. (From those days to now, every presidential election has fanned the flames of anti-immigration. This, Henry, shows that hate and fear are reliable, predictable, and effective political tools.) All of this led eventually to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred the entry of all Chinese immigrants to the United States except for those who were teachers, students, diplomats, ministers, or merchants. It also declared all Chinese totally ineligible for naturalized citizenship. This clause alone allowed the United States to join Nazi Germany and South Africa as the only nations every to withhold naturalization purely on racial grounds. ~ Lisa See

Faced with the crippling sanctions, Iran could simply decide it is paying too high a cost to pursue its nuclear program and could opt for negotiations and reconciliation with the United States and other members of the international community. This is clearly the preferred option of American leaders. ~ Richard Engel

The era when the United States was the dominant global power is steadily coming to an end, and it must find a way of acknowledging this and framing its ambitions and interests accordingly. Instead of claiming the right to continuing primacy in east Asia, for example, it should seek to share that primacy with China. ~ Martin Jacques

Rand Paul just came out with an appeal for a new organization that will counter the efforts by Obama and Hillary Clinton to shred the last remnants of our sovereignty by allowing the United Nations to take away our guns.6 And then, of course, they will come and conquer us. The basis for this is that the UN is now debating a small arms treaty.7 Small arms doesn't mean pistols. It means anything less than a tank. These are just slaughtering people all over the world. Hundreds of thousands of people every year are killed with small arms, and a high percentage come from the United States.8 So there is an effort to have some sort of small arms treaty to regulate their flow. In the minds of the Rand Paul libertarians, this is just another effort by this ominous, fiendish outfit, the United Nations, to take away our freedom. Rand Paul is the Republican senator from Kentucky and son of Ron Paul. ~ Noam Chomsky

It's really necessary for the United States to continue to give strong leadership to the Middle East peace process, supported by European countries at the same time. ~ William Hague

Given the devaluation of literature and of the study of foreign languages per se in the United States, as well as the preponderance of theory over text in graduate literature studies, creative writing programs keep literature courses populated. ~ Marilyn Hacker

You see, each country has a colour, a smell, and also a contagious sickness. In my country the sickness is complacency. In France it's arrogance, and in the United States it's ignorance."

"What about Rwanda?"

"Easy power and impunity. Here, there's total disorder. To someone who has a little money or powere, everything that seems forbidden elsewhere looks permissible and possible. All it takes is to dare it. Someone who's simply a liar in my country can be a fraud artist here, and the fraud artist gets to be a big-time thief. Chaos and most of all poverty give him powers he wouldn't have elsewhere. ~ Gil Courtemanche

I am tired of the misrepresentation, calumny and detraction, heaped upon me by wicked men; and desire and claim, only those principles guaranteed to all men by the Constitution and laws of the United States and of Illinois. ~ Joseph Smith Jr.

A mood of constructive criticism being upon me, I propose forthwith that the method of choosing legislators now prevailing in the United States be abandoned and that the method used in choosing juries be substituted. That is to say, I propose that the men who make our laws be chosen by chance and against their will, instead of by fraud and against the will of all the rest of us, as now...

...that the names of all the men eligible in each assembly district be put into a hat (or, if no hat can be found that is large enough, into a bathtub), and that a blind moron, preferably of tender years, be delegated to draw out one...

The advantages that this system would offer are so vast and obvious that I hesitate to venture into the banality of rehearsing them. It would in the first place, save the commonwealth the present excessive cost of elections, and make political campaigns unnecessary. It would in the second place, get rid of all the heart-burnings that now flow out of every contest at the polls, and block the reprisals and charges of fraud that now issue from the heart-burnings. It would, in the third place, fill all the State Legislatures with men of a peculiar and unprecedented cast of mind – men actually convinced that public service is a public burden, and not merely a private snap. And it would, in the fourth and most important place, completely dispose of the present degrading knee-bending and trading in votes, for nine-tenths of the legislators, hav ~ H.L. Mencken

Kyiv is a bilingual capital, something unusual in Europe and unthinkable in Russia and the United States. Europeans, Russians, and Americans rarely considered that everyday bilingualism might bespeak political maturity, and imagined instead that a Ukraine that spoke two languages must be divided into two groups and two halves. "Ethnic Ukrainians" must be a group that acts in one way, and "ethnic Russians" in another. This is about as true as to say that "ethnic Americans" vote Republican. It is more a summary of a politics that defines people by ethnicity, proposing to them an eternity of grievance rather than a politics of the future. ~ Timothy Snyder

Once the government can demand of a publisher the names of the purchasers of his publications, the free press as we know it disappears. Then the spectre of a government agent will look over the shoulder of everyone who reads. The purchase of a book or pamphlet today may result in a subpoena tomorrow. Fear of criticism goes with every person into the bookstall. The subtle, imponderable pressures of the orthodox lay hold. Some will fear to read what is unpopular, what the powers-that-be dislike. When the light of publicity may reach any student, any teacher, inquiry will be discouraged. The books and pamphlets that are critical of the administration, that preach an unpopular policy in domestic or foreign affairs, that are in disrepute in the orthodox school of thought will be suspect and subject to investigation. The press and its readers will pay a heavy price in harassment. But that will be minor in comparison with the menace of the shadow which government will cast over literature that does not follow the dominant party line. If the lady from Toledo can be required to disclose what she read yesterday and what she will read tomorrow, fear will take the place of freedom in the libraries, book stores, and homes of the land. Through the harassment of hearings, investigations, reports, and subpoenas government will hold a club over speech and over the press."

[United States v. Rumely, 345 U.S. 41 (1953)] ~ William O. Douglas

Fortunately, the time has long passed when people liked to regard the United States as some kind of melting pot, taking men and women from every part of the world and converting them into standardized, homogenized Americans. We are, I think, much more mature and wise today. Just as we welcome a world of diversity, so we glory in an America of diversity
an America all the richer for the many different and distinctive strands of which it is woven. ~ Hubert H. Humphrey

What is most important of this grand experiment, the United States? Not the election of the first president but the election of its second president. The peaceful transition of power is what will separate this country from every other country in the world. ~ George Washington

Just as we can no longer pretend that ducking under wooden desks will keep us safe from a nuclear bomb, we must no longer pretend that a large nuclear stockpile will protect us from the most immediate security threats the United States faces. ~ Mike Quigley

The United States is in a tough spot. ~ Steven Kotler

[Footnote:] We have no Common Vipers in the United States, but we have worse. ~ Will Cuppy

The American people are proud to welcome your majesty back to the United States, a nation you've come to know very well. After all you've dined with 10 U.S. presidents. You've helped our nation celebrate its bicentennial in 17 -in 1976 ~ George W. Bush

They agreed, without any prodding, without the shadows of obligation or compromise, on Barack Obama. At first, even though she wished America would elect a black man as president, she thought it impossible, and she could not imagine Obama as president of the United States; he seemed too slight, too skinny, a man who would be blown away by the wind. Hillary Clinton was sturdier. Ifemelu liked to watch Clinton on television, in her square trouser suits, her face a mask of resolve, her prettiness disguised, because that was the only way to convince the world that she was able. Ifemelu ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Fact: Seventy-seven percent of psychopaths in the United States are incarcerated. ~ Kent A. Kiehl

My priority is to give the United States the kind of influence it should have. ~ John Bolton

I think abortion's wrong, but it's none of my business to tell somebody what's wrong, he said. So I'm pro-choice. I want to keep my nose out of other people's personal business. I guess I fall into conservative when it comes to protecting the United States in a world where a lot of people hate the United States. ~ Dennis Miller

While Congress saw some need to loosen the standard in the initial days of a war, it wanted the president to comply with FISA in carrying out surveillance in the United States. ~ Jonathan Turley

Every once in a while, someone would call me a foreigner or a Yankee, or whatever. In the United States, someone might say something, like how kids do, to point out that you're different. That would come as a surprise to me. As you get old, you either get defensive about it or you accept it and you reach out, because you realize the world's full of people like that. ~ Viggo Mortensen

The thing I've learned traveling through the United States is that the people in each city are usually awesome, it's generally the 'talking heads' that give us trouble. ~ Christopher Sieber

I worry that the Senate is working to consider a series of little-noticed provisions in comprehensive immigration reform that may provide a pathway to a national ID card for all individuals present in the United States - citizens and noncitizens, ~ Rand Paul

It's all that's left,' Leon said in a suddenly weak voice. 'It's what is left of civilization. You take raw material and you transform it. That is civilization. Physical love is all raw meat. That's why everyone's so preoccupied with it now. I have been told by a colleague ten years older than myself--as if it were possible for anybody to be ten years older than I am--that salvation comes from staring at the pubic region of strangers, and freedom, from inducing in myself, by the use of a chemical, the kind of ecstatic lunacy in which I spent most of my adolescence, a condition I attribute solely to the strength of my body at that time and the conviction I had then that I would see socialism in the United States during my lifetime. Now that my bones are weak, my brain is stronger. I don't expect . . . anything. But I cannot bear the grotesque, lying piety of my own unhinged contemporaries. One man, a literary star'--and here he broke off, laughed once, choked and shook his head--'oh, yes, a star, told me he only regretted the pill had not yet been developed in his own youth. All those girls who might have been his! In this age of generalized cock, is this the whole revelation toward which my life has been directed? I would, in any case, prefer to contemplate the organ of a horse. It is handsomer, larger and more comic than anything my fellow man has to show. It is the age of baby shit, darling. Don't kid yourself. My privacy has been violated--what I've admired and thought abo ~ Paula Fox

The Boogeyman,' he said, just to be sure. 'The Boogeyman killed an employee of the President of the United States.'
The president nodded.
Some days, Zach thought, I really hate this job. ~ Christopher Farnsworth

Because the bill in reserving a certain parcel of land in the United States for the use of said Baptist Church comprises a principle and a precedent for the appropriation of funds of the United States for the use and support of religious societies, contrary to the article of the Constitution which declares that "Congress shall make no law respecting a religious establishment." ~ James Madison

In the United States 'First' and 'Second' class can't be painted on railroad cars, for all passengers, being Americans, are equal and it would be 'unAmerican.' But paint 'Pullman' on a car and everyone is satisfied. ~ Owen Wister

I'm beginning to think theres more freedom in North korea sometimes than there is in the United States. ~ Mike Huckabee

Next time
we will roll out the red carpet for you in the United States of Arabia, my brethren! ~ Leonard Leventon

The War of 1812 was, at least in part, America's grand attempt to compel Europe to take the United States seriously as a sovereign nation. ~ Troy Bickham

The citizens of the United States have peculiar motives to support the energy of their constitutional charters. ~ James Madison

Liberals really, really, really like to talk about how open-minded they are - a lot. And yet, today, there are few doing more to suppress the individual's freedom to act, think, say, and write what they want in the United States than so-called progressives. ~ Eric Bolling

The United States must lead the world in reversing climate change. We can do that. ~ Bernie Sanders