5,300 Quotes About America

The Negro farmer started behind,—started in debt. This was not his choosing, but the crime of this happy-go-lucky nation which goes blundering along with its Reconstruction tragedies, its Spanish war interludes and Philippine matinees, just as though God really were dead. Once in debt, it is no easy matter for a whole race to emerge.

The truth is, I do have a chance to fight for something in the place I came from. Something akin to what I continue to fight and hope for in America. Something bigger than myself. And yet, I stay. It's a decision I continue to make, one that continues to haunt me. And even if it is a choice, there's no weight in it. It's meaningless apart from selfish intent.

I argue that the United States will remain the world’s sole superpower for many decades, and probably throughout this century. We are not living in a transitional post–Cold War era. Instead, we are in the midst of what could be called the unipolar era—a period as profound as any epoch in modern history.

They don't fucking see us even when they're looking right at us.

From its earliest days, America has been an incubator of moral ambition.

This country has more problems than an epileptic in an iron maiden, but I still believe in the core values it was founded upon.

A true patriot does not seek to live off of the sacrifices of others. Rather, a true patriot is the one who sacrifices so that others might live. And therefore, we might be quite wise to take a moment and ponder the reality that a nation heavy on recipients and light on patriots will soon have neither.

No assimilation, no America.

The American imagination has never been able to fully recover from its white-supremacist beginnings. Consequently, our laws and attitudes have been straining against the devaluation of the black body. Despite good intentions, the associations of blackness with inarticulate, bestial criminality persist beneath the appearance of white civility. This assumption both frames and determines our individual interactions and experience as citizens.