Peter Temple Quotes

Schools exist in America and have always existed to train responsible citizens of the United States of America. If they don't do that, it's very hard to hold us together as a country, because it's shared values that hold us together.

Alabama citizens, like the vast majority of Americans, respect and value the meaning of decency, and appreciate public institutions that reflect the common values of our society.

Civil religion is the attempt to empower religion, not for the good of religion, but for the creation of the citizen.

The country is the people.

A country, after all, is not something you build as the pharaohs built the pyramids, and then leave standing there to defy eternity. A country is something that is built every day out of certain basic shared values.

Abandon your animosities and make your sons Americans!

I believe that it is of the utmost importance that we all should feel and inculcate among the people and circulate amongst them what I call a sense of compatriotism. We should all feel that we are all nationals of one country, whatever our race, colour, creed, or sect.

Just because you came here in 1880, 1950, whenever, you became an American. You get to celebrate July 4th like every other American. You don't just get the good part. You get the bad part, too. You get all of it.

Multiculturalism, if its logic is fully played out, is the ideology of national suicide.

I think we don't need to be talking about hyphenated Americans, because we are all Americans, and we all want the same thing.

The demographics are changing - and so what? Citizenship is a question of certain agreed-upon values and that is that. Do we believe that? I think at heart we do.

Followers of another political party tell us that we will strengthen ourselves by ignoring our history, our traditions, our mythologies, our culture and vision, and by following the American way.

America rests on shared values rather than shared ethnicity.

The nation... doesn't simply need what we have. It needs what we are.

The nation is a community. Community of individuals, community of generations.

The history of American patriotism is figuring out ways that we can work together to move forward and knit together the common government.

We must not become the new puritans and reject our society. We must address and master the future together. It can be done if we restore the belief that we share a sense of national community, that we share a common national endeavor. It can be done.

No nation is interested in assimilating another without good reason. The assimilation of foreigners is actually in itself a most unpleasant business, and hence also undesirable. New people mean new candidates for benefits from the accumulated public assets, new hands hungrily stretched out for a share of the common loaf of bread. In order for a nation to desire the assimilation of another social group, it must first see in it something so valuable and attractive as to make it worthwhile despite all the inconvenience of including new partners in the distribution of the assets.

If citizenship means anything, it means sharing the pleasures and pains of American life.

Assimilation is what has made America great.

Our economy of allegiance simply is not infinitely expandable. If we become more Virginian or Georgian, surely we will also feel more remote, less responsible for the poor of Kentucky or of the ghettoes of Chicago. If we became more Virginian, we would be less American.

Nobody is sure what our culture is or whether we even have a national culture at all.

We are all Americans, sir.

A common language is critical to cohesion and national identity in an ethnically diverse society

If we leave our values at the door, we give up some of the moral glue that has held our country together