#erica

This is the basis, and I am not being tried for whether I am a Communist, I am being tried for fighting for the right of my people, who are still second-class citizens in this United States of America ↗

— Paul Robeson

#america #equal-rights #fighting #injustice #race

It's my experience that most folk who ride trains could care less where they're going. For them it's the journey itself and the people they meet along the way. You see, at every stop this train makes, a little bit of America, a little bit of your country, gets on and says hello. ↗

— David Baldacci

#train #experience

He carried her over the Owl Creek mountain range without stopping,” he said, quietly this time. “He carried her until he reached one of the hot springs around what became Chapin, and then he walked into the water with her and held her there for three days. He had about given up when she opened her eyes and whispered his name. ↗

— Laura Anderson Kurk

#glass-girl #henry-whitmire #laura-anderson-kurk #love #meg-kavanagh

Country music is the poetry of the American spirit. ↗

— Steve Maraboli

#country-music #poetry #spirit #experience

I thought about the cameras following me in the terminal and pictured my family watching my entrance on TV. I hoped they’d be proud. ↗

— Kiera Cass

#family

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. ↗

— Thomas Jefferson

#equal #inspirational #truth #equality

America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success. ↗

— Sigmund Freud

#am #america #experiment #going #grandiose

It is their mores, then, that make the Americans of the United States...capable of maintaining the rule of democracy.... Too much importance is attached to laws and too little to mores.... I am convinced that the luckiest of geographical circumstances and the best of laws cannot maintain a constitution in spite of mores, whereas the latter can turn even the most unfavorable circumstances...to advantage.... If I have not succeeded in making the reader feel the importance I attach to the practical experience of the Americans, to their habits, laws, and, in a word, their mores, I have failed in the main object of my work. -Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in American ↗

— Naomi Wolf

#constitution #liberty #morality #usa #values

I'm wondering whether I can explain," said Lee. "Where there is no likeness of experience it's very difficult. I understand you were not born in America." "No, in Ireland." "And in a few years you can almost disappear; while I, who was born in Grass Valley, went to school and several years to the University of California, have no chance of mixing." "If you cut your queue, dressed and talked like other people?" "No. I tried it. To the so-called whites I was still a Chinese, but an untrustworthy one; and at the same time my Chinese friends steered clear of me. I had to give it up. ↗

— John Steinbeck

#chinese-american #experience

You all know from past experiences that the white man only sees the bad that our people do to them. They are blind to their own indiscretions. ↗

— Violetta Botzet Luetgers

#minnesota #native-americans #suland #experience