5,300 Quotes About America

I'm not a state or federal employee, so the shutdown only indirectly affects my family and I. I have, however, been out of work before. I know how it feels to pay bills all the while watching what little I managed to save, dwindle. In your hands, Mr. President, America is Troy.

This is America,This vast, confused beauty,This staring, restless speed of loveliness,Mighty, overwhelming, crude, of all forms,Making grandeur out of profusion,Afraid of no incongruities,Sublime in its audacity,Bizarre breaker of moulds,Laughing with strength,Charging down on the past,Glorious and conquering,Destroyer, builder,Invincible pith and marrow of the world,An old world remaking,Whirling into the no-world of all-colored light.

If Kennedy hadn't been shot we would never have had LBJ, and without Johnson, Nixon wouldn't have happened. I am fascinated by the swerves, the chances, but also the inevitability. You look at the line of presidents, America does get what reflects it--it becomes self-explanatory.

After reading Bambara, I wondered for the first time how great an American sentence, paragraph, or book could be if it wasn't, at least partially, written to and for black Americans in the Deep South.

But American group blindness abroad is also rooted in some of our noblest ideals: tolerance, equality, individualism, the power of reason to triumph over irrational hatred, and the conviction that all men are united by their common humanity and love of liberty.

Freedom is a privilege, not a right. And as such, I have no right to ask anything of it, but I have the privilege of giving everything to it.

Somewhere along the way, someone sacrificed enough to crush the rot of tyranny in order to plant the seeds of freedom. And if we don’t carefully tend to the harvest we will eventually inherit the tyranny.

Without freedom, the soul of man perishes long before the body dies. And if nothing else, the haunting specter of a soulless humanity should stir us to patriotism of the greatest sort.

Born into a world, beautiful. Landing in a terra firma of mud. A mind, innocent. A mind, free. That innocence corrupted. A life, having not taken a thousand breaths, torn asunder by the hardened teeth guiding this nation. Stand? For what?