America Quotes - Page 245

When we look at the settling of America we see a Bible in hand and God. Every Thanksgiving has God and the peacefulness of gratitude. It was important when the Twin Towers were hit and the sorrow with them that the first thing Congress did was sing "God Bless America."

All around the United States of America - in the cities and the counties - our public education is suffering and has been suffering. Cuts, cuts, cuts.

Think about the amount of crap the US has done! Between slavery and the genocide of the Native Americans - if any of that had been filmed like [Adolf] Hitler, we'd never live it down.

America is a very seductive place in terms of lifestyle and comfort, but it wasn't for me.

There'd never been a more advantageous time to be a criminal in America than during the 13 years of Prohibition. At a stroke, the American government closed down the fifth largest industry in the United States - alcohol production - and just handed it to criminals - a pretty remarkable thing to do.

All the things that are part of your heritage make you British - that makes this country what it is. It's part of your history. And here, unlike America, it's still living history.

At the foot of the mountain, the park ended and suddenly all was squalor again. I was once more struck by this strange compartmentalization that goes on in America -- a belief that no commercial activities must be allowed inside the park, but permitting unrestrained development outside, even though the landscape there may be just as outstanding. America has never quite grasped that you can live in a place without making it ugly, that beauty doesn't have to be confined behind fences, as if a national park were a sort of zoo for nature.

Most big companies don't like you very much, except hotels, airlines and Microsoft, which don't like you at all.

America remained a land of promise for lovers of freedom. Even Byron, at a moment when he was disgusted with Napoleon for not committing suicide, wrote an eloquent stanza in praise of Washington.

We live in a country where a small number of people have incredible wealth and power. America has more income and wealth inequality than any other major country.

All of you are aware of the tragic history of racism in America, but for a very long time, African-Americans and their white allies came together and they struggled and they stood up for justice and they stood up to lynching and they stood up to segregation and the stood up to a nation where African-Americans couldn't even vote in America.

Your story is for - voting for every disastrous trade agreement, and voting for corporate America. Did I vote against the Wall Street bailout?

What we need to do is to stand up to the big money interests, and the campaign contributors. When we do that, we can, in fact, transform America.

I had the privilege and the honor of chairing the Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs. And it is interesting to me, you know, Republicans give a lot of speeches about how much they love veterans. I work with the American Legion, the VFW, the DAV, the Vietnam Vets, and virtually every veterans organization to put together the most comprehensive piece of the veterans legislation in the modern history of America. That's what I did.

Most people that I know don believe that a handful of corporations request sit together without disclosure, by the way, and pump hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars into the political process. That is not the democracy that many of us believe America should be.

In America, we have struggled too much, too long as a country trying to overcome racism and sexism and homophobia. We cannot go back to a more discriminatory society.

Climate change is real, it is caused by human activity, and it is already causing devastating problems in America and around the world.

Democracy appears to me potentially a higher form of political organization than any kind of dictatorship. But if it turns out that in America, which could afford a decent living for everyone, the comfortable majority is willing to condone the misery and abuse of a minority for an indefinite period, the exploitation by the majority becomes as repugnant as exploitation by an oligarchy, and democracy loses half its supposed superiority.

You don't have people chanting 'Death to America' in Israel.

We obviously have to honor the commitments that have been made to the people who are already retired or near the retirement age. But we need to tell the truth about the fact that when we set the retirement age at age 65 in America, life expectancy was only 62.

There is more food in the world than we could possibly use. There's a huge surplus of food per capita, but it's locked away and rotting in the storehouses of the Western world, whereas in the East, in many parts of Africa, India and South America, people are starving to death. Millions of people are dying of starvation in a time in which there is a huge surplus of food.

In the old days of America when communities were separated by hundreds of miles, why were they able to thrive? Because if it was harvest time and the farmer was up in the tree picking apples and fell down and broke his leg, everybody pitched in and harvested his crops for him. If somebody got killed by a bear, everybody took care of their family.

I'd say the main way people get into terrible financial trouble is just to spend too much money relative to their income, and that is an endemic problem in the United States of America, and that's the kind of thing that should be taught about in schools.

It is easy to be mindless in America, because dreaming of and living for a better tomorrow is the American way. ... The problem is, in the second half of the twentieth century, we have gotten so good at living for tomorrow that most of us spend very little time in the present.

The ideas of ancient Greece helped inspire America's founding fathers as they reached for democracy. Our revolutionary ideas helped inspire Greeks as they sought their own freedom.