#america

Josh: So, Toby, it’s election night. What do you say about a country that goes out of its way to protect even those citizens that try to destroy it? Toby: God bless America. ↗

— Aaron Sorkin

#democracy #freedom #west-wing #freedom

Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged. Missing me one place, search another. I stop somewhere waiting for you. ↗

— Walt Whitman

#song

I know there was a time, when our country was new, when the assignment of these numbers helped organize something that was on the brink of not existing. But we are no longer that country. We are so much more now. ↗

— Kiera Cass

#change #kiera-cass #the-elite #the-selection #change

All of us, poor & rich alike, have been conditioned by our upbringings. Impoverished men & women may become lulled into a state of "learned helplessness" without hope to change their lives. Likewise, the wealthy can walk in a state of "learned blindness" ignoring the desperation of the local & global poor. ↗

— John Green

#homeless-in-america #change

In the old Republican days the subject of slavery and of the saving of the Union made appeals to the consciences and liberty-loving instincts of the people. These later years have been full of talk about commerce and dinner pails, but I feel sure that the American conscience and the American love of liberty have not been smothered. They will break through this crust of sordidness and realize that those only keep their liberties who accord liberty to others. ↗

— Benjamin Harrison

#justice #liberty #love

I have come to the conclusion never again to think of marrying, and for this reason, I can never be satisfied with anyone who would be blockhead enough to have me. ↗

— Abraham Lincoln

#love #marriage #us-presidents #wisdom #love

The American and Russian capabilities in space science and technology mesh; they interdigitate. Each is strong where the other is weak. This is a marriage made in heaven - but one that has been surprisingly difficult to consummate. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#russia #space-exploration #marriage

…he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men [...] In the hush his entrance creates, the excessive courtesy the weary woman behind the counter shows him amplifies his strangeness. He orders coffee quietly and studies the rim of the cup to steady the sliding in his stomach. He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I’m outside or is it all America? ↗

— John Updike

#angstrom #inspirational #isolation #loneliness #outside

I knew that I lived in a country in which the aspirations of black people were limited, marked-off. Yet I felt that I had to go somewhere and do something to redeem my being alive. ↗

— Richard Wright

#inspirational #inspirational

France is to me the heroine in the romance of all the nations of all time. This feeling was born in me years ago when I read how her noble sons had defended America in its cradle. Today I am proud that I am one of the millions who will come to save our heroine from the clutches of the villain from across the Rhine. ↗

— William Arthur Sirmon

#france #germany #historical-romance #history #inspirational