Founding America Quotes

The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy but cannot disjoin them. ~ Thomas Jefferson

I have to tell you, as your Secretary of State, I went to 112 countries, and when people hear those words, they hear America. So don't let anyone tell you that our country is weak. We're not. Don't let anyone tell you we don't have what it takes. We do. ~ Hillary Clinton

The Tower of Babel" ...
The undersigned citizens, being artists, painters, sculptors, architects, and others devoted to and desirous preserving the amenities of Paris, wish to protest, in the name of our national good taste, against such an erection in the very heart of our city, as the monstrous and useless Eiffel Tower, already christened ... " The Tower of Babel" ...
How much longer is the City of Paris to be a play-ground for these barbarous and sordid imaginations which disfigure and dishonor her? For the Eiffel Tower, which even commercially minded America rejected, is a public dishonor to our city. All our historic buildings, our monuments of rare and appealing beauty, are dwarfed and humiliated by this monstrous apotheosis of the factory chimney whose odious shadow will lie over the city ...
Plea to the Exposition Director in opposition to the Eiffel Tower, signed by artists and writers and published in Le Temps, 1887 ~ Carol McCleary

Mitt Romney said that he liked to fire people. Well, there's a pretty good message to send to Middle America. When Rick Perry heard that, he said, 'Well that's nothing. I like to execute people.' ~ David Letterman

Every land or property owner in America would be tickled to death to pay 45 per cent of his profits, if he didn't have to pay anything if he didn't make it. ~ Will Rogers

our democracy is controlled by a wealthy elite. Politicians who work for the wealthy need the police to protect them from the people. And so the whole chain of command protects the killer cop. The ruling class give carte blanche to law enforcement, who in turn press down on those most stranded by the neoliberal state, the poor-- and more so, the Black poor."
-- Nicolas Powers ~ Maya Schenwar

There is clearly a feeling abroad that God smiled on our beginnings, and that we should return to them as we can. If we really did attempt to return to them, we would find Moses as well as Christ, Calvin, and his legions of intellectual heirs. And we would find a recurrent, passionate, insistence on bounty or liberality, mercy and liberality, on being kind and liberal, liberal and bountiful, and enjoying the great blessings God has promised to liberality to the poor. ~ Marilynne Robinson

Among the tastemakers and power brokers and intellectual agenda setters of late-twentieth-century America, orthodox Christianity was completely déclassé. ~ Ross Douthat

They have clubbed us off the streets they are stronger they are rich they hire and fire the politicians the newspapereditors the old judges the small men with reputations the collegepresidents the wardheelers (listen businessmen collegepresidents judges America will not forget her betrayers) they hire the men with guns the uniforms the policecars the patrolwagons all right you have won you will kill the brave men our friends tonight (author's punctuation) ~ John Dos Passos

Not since the days of George W. Bush's 'Clear Skies' and 'Healthy Forests' initiatives has America been presented with a project as cravenly corporate and backward-looking as the Keystone XL pipeline. ~ Jeff Goodell

We are succeeding in Iraq. Thank you, America. ~ Iyad Allawi

I here violate direct and explicit orders that were given to me, were given to me in the best interests of the United States of America. I here give you my true name, and I identify myself as the man you knew as "Frank Wirtanen." ... I exist. I can be seen, heard, and touched almost any day. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Americans need to continue to develop broad-based movements that reject the established political parties and rethink the social formations necessary to bring about a radical democracy. We see this in the Black Lives Matter movement as well as in a range of other movements that are resisting corporate money in politics, the widespread destruction of the environment, nuclear war and the mass incarceration state. ~ Henry A. Giroux

I am a Londoner and I love my home. There are many things about this country which drive me crazy, but when I am in America, I feel wrong there. ~ Toby Stephens

First of all, when you live in a country like Canada, it's quite different from America in the sense that it's very tied to traditions that were born in Britain. ~ Geddy Lee

"I criticize America because I love her. I want her to stand as a moral example to the world." ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

America, to me, is freedom. ~ Willie Nelson

Living in America and, of course, just being women in general, we've got more strength than we think we do. ~ Dolly Parton

America was founded by the refuse of the religious fanatics of England, these undesirable elements that came over on the Mayflower. Ignorant, religious fanatics who land here and abuse the Indians. ~ Frank Zappa

In the struggle for the rights of the poor in Central America and other places where globalization is bringing its negative effects, there is no organization more effective than the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights. ~ Thomas Gumbleton

I cannot tell you how angry it makes me to hear people from North America tell me how much they love England, how beautiful England is, with its traditions. All they see is some frumpy, wrinkled-up person passing by in a carriage waving at a crowd. But what I see is the millions of people, of whom I am just one, made orphans: no motherland, no fatherland, no gods, no mounds of earth for holy ground, no excess of love which might lead to the things that an excess of love sometimes brings, and worst and most painful of all, no tongue. ~ Jamaica Kincaid

All over America, people were pulling credentials out of their pockets and sticking them under someone else's nose to prove they had been somewhere or done something. And I thought someday everyone in America will suddenly jump up and say, 'I don't take any shit!' and start pushing and cursing and clawing at the man next to him. ~ William S. Burroughs

The only way in which all men in America are equal, is in the courtroom - Atticus ~ Harper Lee

We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so 'realistic' that they can live in them. - Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961) ~ Gary Goldhammer

America was indebted to immigration for her settlement and prosperity. That part of America which had encouraged them most had advanced most rapidly in population, agriculture and the arts. ~ James Madison

Though many non-Native Americans have learned very little about us, over time we have had to learn everything about them. We watch their films, read their literature, worship in their churches, and attend their schools. Every third-grade student in the United States is presented with the concept of Europeans discovering America as a "New World" with fertile soil, abundant gifts of nature, and glorious mountains and rivers. Only the most enlightened teachers will explain that this world certainly wasn't new to the millions of indigenous people who already lived here when Columbus arrived. ~ Wilma Mankiller

At the time Latin America was composed only of colonies. We were up against the biggest army of the colonial world, the Napoleonic army. Haiti was ostracized for almost a century. Surviving in that international context is in itself a feat. ~ Michele Montas

We must have a government which is not only a guarantor of public order and safety and which preserves the right of White citizens to keep and to bear arms, which is the ancient hallmark of a truly free people, but we must have government which maintains an eternal vigilance against the enemies, both internal and external, of a White America. ~ George Lincoln Rockwell

The incredible story of progress that is America has always been built by those who ask why, what if, and why not. Our schools must begin instilling that wonder in our children again so that their generation will unite around the next great project of our time, whether it be declaring America energy independent or launching the next great technological revolution. ~ Barack Obama

New York police force seems like unlike any other in America and even the world. There's a very specific culture dynamic, a specific chemistry. There's almost a specific set of rules because of the city and the size of it. ~ Theo James

Well, if you look at all of the cultures in America, this is a great opportunity for us to really get acquainted with the rest of the world. America is the only place you can do that, but we don't have sense enough to take advantage of that. ~ Erykah Badu