Andrew Jackson Quotes

For all the huffing and blowing we get about rugged individualism, the American spirit and the American experiment always have had at their heart the notion that the government is all of us and that, therefore, the government may keep things in trust for all of us.

Our national purpose, not our party differences, must define the American Brand. We must change the conversation from one centered around what defines our differences to one that hangs a lantern on what binds us, supports our collective well being and makes us all stronger and more productive as a result.

A nation with no equality, no solidarity, and no belief in its own cause is not a nation worth fighting for. It is not a nation that a young woman or a young man will kill and get killed for.

What if we as Americans can no longer define ourselves in opposition to a well defined evil?

The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it.

Nations are not truly great solely because the individuals composing them are numerous, free, and active; but they are great when these numbers, this freedom, and this activity are employed in the service of an ideal higher than that of an ordinary man, taken by himself.

All colors and blends of Americans have somewhat the same tendencies. It's a breed — selected out by accident. And so we're overbrave and overfearful — we're kind and cruel as children. We're overfriendly and at the same time frightened of strangers. We boast and are impressed. We're oversentimental and realistic. We are mundane and materialistic — and do you know of any other nation that acts for ideals?

There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is wrong.

The first obligation is to the French people and establish solidarity among our own citizens.

If we want the Republic to be solid, we must first build its foundation. We need not look abroad for this foundation; we should seek it in the hearts of all the people of the nation.

For America, our interests are our values, and our values are our interests.

My success at living a moral life is pretty terrible, but I still aspire to do it! I identify with the Johnny Cash thing that trying to live a good life and be a good person are not necessarily the same thing!

I learned from my illiterate but wise mother that all rights to be deserved and preserved came from duty well done. Thus the very right to live accrues to us only when we do the duty of citizenship of the world. From this one fundamental statement, perhaps it is easy enough to define the duties of Man and Woman and correlate every right to some corresponding duty to be first performed. Every other right can be shown to be a usurpation hardly worth fighting for.

It is that fundamental belief, it is that fundamental belief, I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper that makes this country work. It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams and yet still come together as one American family. E pluribus unum. Out of many, one.

One of the revelations in that book [Lincoln in the Bardo] for me was this idea about citizenship. Even that word - citizenship - for someone my age, it makes me cringe. But, to me, the political space we're in now argues for a reboot of fairly simple ideas and the examination of the way that Americans have not been living into them.

France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter - it was the graves at Shiloh and the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, and the country boys dying in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart.

Without duty, life is soft and boneless.

If you are focusing your anger at government, you are focusing your anger at all of us. Government is just a personification of this country.

The very existence of society depends on the fact that every member of it tacitly admits he is not the exclusive possessor of himself, and that he admits the claim of the polity of which he forms a part, to act, to some extent, as his master.

That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it. Every one thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest; and only when he is himself concerned as an individual. For besides other considerations, everybody is more inclined to neglect the duty which he expects another to fulfill.

Without a doubt. It's woven into our DNA in a very deep way and so to kind of be smacked in the face with the hypocrisy of the America that we were sold was a liberating and harsh experience.

The State is the sum total of the sacrifice, on its behalf, of its members.

I hope America manages to steer itself away from partisanship and back to patriotism; we are all Americans. And as long as I can make people laugh and feel better, I'm happy.

My own sense as an American is that we have begun to experience the disadvantages of framing virtually all moral issues in terms of individual rights. American history has consisted of swings back and forth between rights talk on the one hand and talk of duties, responsibilities, and the common good on the other hand. Recent decades have seen a big swing toward rights, and conceived in very individualistic terms, which hasn't always been the case even with rights.

America is great, because America is good. And it really is up to all of us to make that true, now and in the future, and particularly for our children and our grandchildren.