Richard Hofstadter Quotes

A national festival is an occasion to refine and rebuild the national character.

A country cannot develop without a strong identity.

Our predecessors understood that the ties that bind America are far stronger than disagreements over any particular policy and far more durable and profound than any party affiliation.

In America the cohesion was a matter of choice and will. But in Europe it was organic.

I have confidence that we can form this kind of national community.

A nation is a totality of men united through community of fate into a community of character.

What supposedly bound that Commonwealth together was a mysterious shared identity - Britishness.

There is no 'European people' united by common mores.

America is not anything if it consists of each of us. It is something only if it consists of all of us.

The secret of America is compromise. Compromise is a sign of weakness in any other country. In America it is a great strength.

He who would dare to undertake to establish a nation would have to feel himself capable of altering, so to speak, human nature, to transform each individual, who by his very nature is a unique and perfect whole, into a mere part of a greater whole, from which this individual would in a sense receive his life and his being.

A nation is a historical group of men of recognizable cohesion, held together by a common enemy.

E Pluribus Unum, the Latin phrase on the great seal of the United States literally translated means one from many. We need to reattach pluribus to unum—the many to the one.

Country is not a mere zone of territory. The true country is the idea to which it gives birth ... the sense of communion which united in one all the sons of that territory.

In America, by and large, in the middle of the road you find us, we the people.

Neither the crushing powers of the centralized State nor the teachings of mutual hatred ... could weed out the feeling of human solidarity, deeply lodged in men's understanding and heart, because it has been nurtured by all our preceding evolution.

We are all Americans, sir.

The motherland is the common mother, the unity within which isolated the individuals penetrate and become enmeshed. It is the holy name that expresses the voluntary fusion of all interests into one interest, of all lives into one lasting and perpetual life.

A great aggregation of men, sane of mind and warm of heart, creates a moral consciousness which is called a nation

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

... My firm conviction [is] that it is the force of ideas rather than the impact of material things that made us a great nation. It is my conviction, too, that only the power of ideas, of enduring values, can keep us a great nation. For where there is not vision the people perish

A government, to afford the needful protection and exercise proper care for the welfare of a people, must have homogeneity in its constituents. It is this necessity which has divided the human race into separate nations, and finally has defeated the grandest efforts which conquerors have made to give unlimited extent to their domain.

… we need to know ourselves, not only our own little group or our own little part of the country, but the country as a whole and all its people. This will inspire in us an even greater fervor of spirit to see our country attain the ideals we have always cherished.

All societies of men, whether we call them states or churches, should make their bond to consist in a common object and a common practice, rather than in a common belief; in other words, their end should be good rather than truth. We may consent to act together, but - we cannot consent to believe together

After eight years as your president, I still believe that there is much more that unites us than divides us.