Thomas Jefferson Quotes

We are all American. If we believe that we are Americans, if we believe that what binds us together is what we have in common, then it must include the common language, and that common tongue is English.

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

America is destined to be peopled by one nation, speaking one language, professing one general system of religious and political principles, and accustomed to one general tenor of social usages and customs.

Unity was the real key to the success of the United States. The constitution of 1787 was in many respects the imposition of a central national government upon the quarrelsome states... In a country so constituted, the weaknesses of one state were compensated for by the strengths of another.

The world’s best hope depended on the continued Union of these States.

We are all Americans, sir.

… there is no North, no South, no East, no West, but all Americans forever.

Whereas we and you and our people and your people, free since ancient times, share the same national ancestry and are urged to come together more eagerly and joyfully in friendship by a common language and by common custom, we have sent you our beloved kinsman, the bearers of this letter, to negotiate with you in our name about permanently strengthening and maintaining inviolate the special friendship between us and you, so that with God's will our nation may be able to recover her ancient liberty.

Americans are a quarter of a billion people who have almost nothing in common except for the fact they've been told they have lots in common.

America is a collection of people from different races, religions, and backgrounds - that is part of what makes us great. But a common language is what brings all of those people together to form a community.

All America is much the same.

We have to truly become a united people of the United States of America, and divisiveness cannot make that happen.

But this is predicated upon the man's becoming in very fact an American and nothing but an American. If he tries to keep segregated with men of his own origin and separated from the rest of America, then he isn't doing his part as an American. There can be no divided allegiance here. . . We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding-house; and we have room for but one soul loyalty, and that is loyalty to the American people.

I never did ask more, nor ever was willing to accept less, than for all the States, and the people thereof, to take and hold their places, and their rights, in the Union, under the Constitution of the United States. For this alone have I felt authorized to struggle; and I seek neither more nor less now.

There's not a liberal America and a conservative America - there's the United States of America.

May the States be so bound to each other as forever to defy European politics. Upon that union, their consequence, their happiness, will depend. This is the first wish of a heart more truly American than words can express.

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

In my last I contended that none of those ties which are necessary to bind a people together and make them one, existed between the colonists and Mexicans.

The Union as it was. The Union as it is, and the Union as it shall be.

For every purpose essential to the defense of these states in the progress of the present war, and necessary to the attainment of the objects of it, the States are as fully, legally and absolutely confederated as it is possible to be.

The union of so many states will be seen in the eyes of the world—a wonder.

No political dreamer was ever wild enough to think of breaking down the lines which separate the States, and of compounding the American people into one common mass.

We have seen, in the example of the United States how the dynamic elements within society understood the need for unity and fought their bitter civil war to maintain the political union that was threatened by the reactionary forces.

The distinctions between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers and New Englanders are no more. I am not a Virginian; I am an American.... All distinctions are thrown down; all America is one mass.

I shall yet live to see it an English nation.