All Quotes By Tag: America

“I think I have many spenglerian moods about the country, and that some day people will look back and think ‘this was a really goofy, unadmirable stupid time.”

“America isn’t perfect but there’s not a better place in the world for people of any faith.”

“The country and culture commonly known as “America” had had a badly split personality all through its history. Its overt laws were almost always puritanical for a people whose covert behavior tended to be Rabelaisian; its major religions were all Apollonian in varying degrees—its religious revivals were often hysterical in a fashion almost Dionysian.”

“America was, to them, the place that good people went to when they died. They were prepared to believe just about anything could happen in America.”

“We are a nation not only of dreamers, but also of fixers. We have looked at our land and people, and said, time and time again, “This is not good enough; we can be better.”

“Let it be told to the future world that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet it.”

“It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break; the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter’s courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent’s willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate.”

“We are going to win our freedom because both the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of the Almighty God are embodied in our echoing demands. So however difficult it is during this period, however difficult it is to continue to live with the agony and the continued existence of racism, however difficult it is to live amidst the constant hurt, the constant insult and the constant disrespect, I can still sing we shall overcome. We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.We shall overcome because Carlisle is right. “No lie can live forever.” We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right. “Truth crushed to earth will rise again.” We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell is right. “Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne.”   Yet that scaffold sways the future. We shall overcome because the Bible is right.  “You shall reap what you sow.” With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when all of God’s children all over this nation – black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old negro spiritual, “Free at Last, Free at Last, Thank God Almighty, We are Free At Last.”

“Saying someone is religious is heard in most of America as a compliment, a reassuring affirmation that someone will be moral, ethical, and after a few glasses of wine, a freak in the bedroom.”

“I believe that we are lost here in America, but I believe we shall be found. And this belief, which mounts now to the catharsis of knowledge and conviction, is for me–and I think for all of us–not only our own hope, but America’s everlasting, living dream.”

“In these downbeat times, we need as much hope and courage as we do vision and analysis; we must accent the best of each other even as we point out the vicious effects of our racial divide and pernicious consequences of our maldistribution of wealth and power. We simply cannot enter the twenty-first century at each other’s throats, even as we acknowledge the weighty forces of racism, patriarchy, economic inequality, homophobia, and ecological abuse on our necks. We are at a crucial crossroad in the history of this nation–and we either hang together by combating these forces that divide and degrade us or we hang separately. Do we have the intelligence, humor, imagination, courage, tolerance, love, respect, and will to meet the challenge? Time will tell. None of us alone can save the nation or world. But each of us can make a positive difference if we commit ourselves to do so.”

“Off in the distance there were galleons of shock-white cumulus coulds gathering in the wide sky’s cerulean harbor, and their azure shadows floated over the flatlands. Billy surprised himself by saying: “I love it here. I’ll never leave.”

“Trump’s America is not America: not today’s or tomorrow’s, but yesterday’s.Trump’s America is brutal, perverse, regressive, insular and afraid. There is no hope in it; there is no light in it. It is a vast expanse of darkness and desolation.And that is a vision of America that most of the people in this country cannot and will not abide.”

“My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.”

“How had this happened? Everyone in the world knew more than us, about everything, and this I hated then found hugely comforting.”