Robert Penn Warren Quotes

America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense, it is the other way round. Human rights invented America.

Tonight, we gather to affirm the greatness of our nation - not because of the height of our skyscrapers, or the power of our military, or the size of our economy. Our pride is based on a very simple premise, summed up in a declaration made over two hundred years ago.

The perfection of our union, especially our commitment to equality of opportunity, has been a story of constant striving to live up to our Founding principles. This is what Abraham Lincoln meant when he said, 'In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free - honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve.'

America is great not because it's a team. America is great because it is a nation whose founding documents elevated the rights of the individual.

I'm honored to serve as mayor of my hometown where our founders started America with three simple words: 'We, the people.' And when they said 'people' they didn't mean 'corporations.'

This country was founded upon the principle that we are all endowed with certain inalienable rights to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness - those rights are what make America great, and they belong to each and every one of us.

I seek to call America home to those principles that gave us birth.

The Founding Fathers are not just some people that happened to get mad a long time ago and want their freedom. They were special people in addition to what their natural yearnings were.

I was born and grew up in the greatest, the noblest achievement of the human race on this planet - which was called the United States of America.

We have a long heritage of freedom that defines America. We believe there is a Creator who blessed us with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

America is the friend of all the liberties of the world. She is the guardian only of her own.

We are a people on a quest. We go and look for the kind of nation we want. The quest is the enduring American experiment. The meaning is in the seeking.

Although The Declaration of Independence is not, like The Constitution, the law of the land, it is certainly the spirit of the land.

All honor to Jefferson—the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document an abstract truth applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there that to-day and in all coming days it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.

We hold these truths to be self-evident,” begins the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. Who holds these truths? Americans hold these truths. Who are Americans? People who adhere to these truths. National identity and political principle were inseparable.

Our nation was not founded because we all looked alike, or prayed alike, or descended from the same family tree. But our founders, in their genius, in this, the oldest constitutional democracy, put forth on this earth the idea that all are created equal; that we all have inalienable rights.

America is the only nation in the world based on an idea - freedom and self-government - so if we don't understand that idea and what sacrifices were made to win that freedom and keep it for over two centuries, how can we possibly continue to keep it?

We now enter a new age of American history, and the question to be answered is this: Will we restore the republic our forefathers created, or will we allow it to be annihilated by those who hate America, its history, and all it stands for?

The truly revolutionary promise of our nation's founding document is the freedom to pursue happiness-with-a-capital-H.

What makes America great was a government that was founded to be limited to doing one thing. I really believe the whole purpose of America, the aspirational value - why everybody who wants to come to this country wants to come here - was because we respected the dignity of every living person.

The challenge is always before us. Whenever we lose sight of the principles that mattered to our founders we run into trouble.

Freedom. Freedom of religion. Freedom to speak their mind. Freedom to build a life. And yes, freedom to build a business. With their own hands. This is the essence of the American experience.

America is a country with so much opportunity. I'm living the blessings of what this country offers.

For the freedoms our founding fathers not only dreamed about, but made into reality. It is that same pursuit of freedom today that is helping to make our world a safer place.

America was not founded to improve health care or housing; it was founded for freedom.