#states

My point is that this Potter business has legs. It will run and run, and we must be utterly mad, as a country, to leave it to the Americans to make money from a great British invention. I appeal to the children of this country and to their Potter-fiend parents to write to Warner Bros and Universal, and perhaps, even, to the great J K herself. Bring Harry home to Britain—and if you want a site with less rainfall than Rome, with excellent public transport, and strong connections to Harry Potter, I have just the place. ↗

— Boris Johnson

#england #harry-potter #jk-rowling #rain #rome

While Congress saw some need to loosen the standard in the initial days of a war, it wanted the president to comply with FISA in carrying out surveillance in the United States. ↗

— Jonathan Turley

#comply #congress #days #fisa #initial

Some foreign states will act against a dictatorship only to gain their own economic, political, or military control over the country. ↗

— Gene Sharp

#foreign-states #dictatorship

When Hitler declared war on the United States, he was betting that German soldiers, raised up in the Hitler Youth, would always out fight American soldiers, brought up in the Boy Scouts. He lost that bet. The Boy Scouts had been taught how to figure their way out of their own problems. ↗

— Stephen E. Ambrose

#resourcefulness #united-states

Tyranny is Tyranny, let it come from whom it may. ↗

— Howard Zinn

#united-states

We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing. ↗

— Gore Vidal

#politics #united-states #united-states

To restrict or legalize abortion, to allow or forbid gay marriage, a legislator would need to write and pass a law, get it signed by the president or a governor, and perhaps override a veto. A Supreme Court justice need only persuade four other people. If he or she is not internally constrained by the authority of a text, he or she is not constrained. ↗

— Michael J. Gerson

#politics #politics-of-the-united-states #same-sex-marriage #scotus #united-states

No commander was ever privileged to lead a finer force; no commander ever derived greater inspiration from the performance of his troops. ↗

— John J. Pershing

#miltary #the-great-war #united-states-military #world-war- #inspirational

America is the greatest engine of innovation that has ever existed, and it can't be duplicated anytime soon, because it is the product of a multitude of factors: extreme freedom of thought, an emphasis on independent thinking, a steady immigration of new minds, a risk-taking culture with no stigma attached to trying and failing, a noncorrupt bureaucracy, and financial markets and a venture capital system that are unrivaled at taking new ideas and turning them into global products. ↗

— Thomas L. Friedman

#capitalism #economics #freedom #liberty #politics

The issue is whether the ultimate civil authority of the United States can tolerate actions in contempt of constitutional lines of authority. Any lessening of civil power over military power must inevitably lead away from democracy. ↗

— Harold Russell

#any #authority #away #civil #constitutional