Cynthia Ozick Quotes

We live in the United States. British settlers founded the first colony in North America. And English is our language.

Calvin was virtually the founder of America.

The English language is the law of the people of the United States.

Bottom line: this is the United States. And we speak English here.

America started out as an invention society.

Insist on one language. English for all Americans.

English should be acknowledged once and for all as the official language of the United States.

Massachusetts developed America.

Our Constitution has affirmed that Gaelic is the national language. Yet there is scarcely one person in a thousand throughout Ireland who cannot speak English and scarcely one in ten who can speak Irish easily.

If you grew up in Boston, you actually grew up thinking that Patriots' Day is a major American holiday, sort of like the other Fourth of July.

There is no question of the government or myself attaching less importance to the use of English.

The first English settlers of North America knew they were making history. New Englanders in particular were so sure of it that they started writing their own accounts of themselves as soon as they got here.

But I'm a daughter of the American revolution, my grandpa fought in World War II, I have lots of family members who were in the military, and it really just was part of growing up for me.

Who would think it possible to redirect historical scholarship by explaining what Thomas Jefferson said in the Declaration of Independence?

Here in Britain, we can get a little bit snobby about American history. Yes, their history is not quite as long as ours. But it isn't all that short, either.

You can't understand America without understanding the Puritans. In many ways, we're still living out their legacy in ways that are good and bad.

So many able historians have worked over seventeenth-century New England that one would think there was little left to be learned from the people who lived there - fewer than 100,000 at the end of the century. Seldom, apart perhaps from the Greeks and Romans, have so few been studied by so many.

I'm very interested in the early American history, the time when the country came together.

Bilingualism for the individual is fine, but not for a country.

There are plenty of Minutemen. People willing to be Minutemen. Where are the people that want to be George Washington? Where are the Benjamin Franklins? Where is Sam Adams? Where is John Adams?

It was decided almost two hundred years ago that English should be the language spoken in the United States. It is not known, however, why this decision has not been carried out.

George Washington’s brother, Lawrence, was the Uncle of Our Country.

[John] Adams never hid his jealousy and resentment of the other Founders, especially Benjamin Franklin.

Those men who laid the foundation of this American government and signed he Declaration of Independence were the best spirits the God of heaven could find on the face of the earth. They were choice spirits . . . noble spirits before God.

Upon my return from the army to Baltimore in the winter of 1777, I sat next to John Adams in Congress, and upon my whispering to him and asking him if he thought we should succeed in our struggle with Great Britain, he answered me, "Yes-if we fear God and repent of our sins."