America

"What's right with America is a willingness to discuss what's wrong with America."
        --Harry C. Bauer

"America is a place where Jewish merchants sell Zen love beads to agnostics for Christmas."
        --John Burton Brimer

"America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense, it is the other way around. Human rights invented America."
        --Jimmy Carter

"America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to denegration without the usual interval of civilization."
        --Georges Clemenceau

"Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels -- men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, we may never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversiion."
        --Dwight D. Eisenhower

"They [the founders] proclaimed to all the world the revolutionary doctrine of the divine rights of the common man. That doctrine has ever since been the heart of the American faith"
        --Dwight D. Eisenhower

"Knavery seems to be so much the striking feature of its [America's] inhabitants that it may not in the end be an evil that they will become aliens to the kingdom."
        --George III, 1782

"We Americans have no commission from God to police the world"
        --Benjamin Harrison

"It is part of the American character to consider nothing as desperate"
        --Thomas Jefferson

"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

"With malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right."
        --Abraham Lincoln

"No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public."
        --H. L. Mencken

"You wonŽt find average Americans on the left or on the right. YouŽll find them at Kmart."
        --Zell Miller

"I wasnŽt a great communicator, but I communicated great things, and they didnŽt spring full bloom from my brow, they came from the heart of a great nation...the principles that have guided us for two centuries."
        --Ronald Reagan

"Now we hear again the echoes of our past. A general falls to his knees in the hard snow of Valley Forge; a lonely President paces the darkened halls, and ponders his struggle to preserve the Union; the men of the Alamo call out encouragement to each other; a settler pushes west and sings a song, and the song echoes out forever and fills the unknowing air. It is the American sound. It is hopeful, big-hearted, idealistic, daring, decent, and fair. That's our heritage; that is our song. We sing it together as of old, as we raise our voices to the God who is the Author of this most tender music. And may He continue to hold us close as we fill the world with our sound -- sound in unity, affection, and love -- one people under God, dedicated to the dream of freedom that He has placed in the human heart, called upon now to pass that dream on to a waiting and hopeful world. God bless you and may God bless America."
        --Ronald Reagan, Second Inaugural Address, 1985

"The United States investigates everything -- usually after it's dead."
        --Will Rogers

"America has a very unique record. We never lost a war or won a conference..."
        --Will Rogers

"I bet after seeing us, George Washington would sue us for calling him 'father'. "
        --Will Rogers

"If we ever pass out as a great nation we ought to put on our tombstone, 'America died from a delusion that she has moral leadership'."
        --Will Rogers

"You shake a slogan at an American and it's just like showing a hungry dog a bone."
        --Will Rogers

"Ohio claims they are due a president as they haven't had one since Taft. Look at the United States, they have not had one since Lincoln."
        --Will Rogers

"The saving grace of America lies in the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans are possessed of two great qualities -- a sense of humor and a sense of proportion."
        --Franklin D. Roosevelt

"All privileges based on wealth, and all emnity to honest men merely because they are wealthy, are un-American."
        --Theodore Roosevelt

"The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life."
        --Theodore Roosevelt, letter 01/10/1917

"What is the essence of America? Finding and maintaining that perfect, delicate balance between freedom 'to' and freedom 'from'."
        --Marilyn Vos Savant

"In America nobody says you have to keep the circumstances you were born with."
        --Amy Tan

"Americans are so enamored of equality, they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom."
        --Alexis de Tocqueville

"In the end, the state of the Union comes down to the character of the people. ... I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her commodious harbors, her ample rivers, and it was not there. I sought for it in the fertile fields, and boundless prairies, and it was not there. I sought it in her rich mines, and vast world commerce, and it was not there. Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power."
        --Alexis de Tocqueville

"When even one American -- who has done nothing wrong -- is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth, then all Americans are in peril"
        --Harry S. Truman

"It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either."
        --Mark Twain

"Give the American people a good cause, and there's nothing they can't lick."
        --John Wayne

"The great trouble with you Americans is that you are still under the influence of that second-rate -- shall I say third-rate? -- mind, Karl Marx."
        --H. G. Wells

"America is not a mere body of traders; it is a body of free men. Our greatness is built upon our freedom -- is moral, not material. We have a great ardor for gain; but we have a deep passion fo the rights of man."
        --Woodrow Wilson

"A man who thinks of him-self as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American. And the man who goes among you to trade upon your nationality is no worthy son to live under the Stars and Stripes."
        --Woodrow Wilson