Frederick Douglass 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.

We are all Americans, sir.

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.

Abandon your animosities and make your sons Americans!

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.

It may be the optimist in me, but I think America has a uniquely powerful and capacious glue internally. The American identity has always been ethnically and religiously neutral, so within one generation you have Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Jamaican-Americans - they feel American. It's a huge success story.

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

A good nationalism has to depend on a principle of the common people, on myths of a struggling commonality.

America is the sum of all our journeys as we search for our national community and our national culture.

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.

Corporate America has conceived a Bicentennial plan to manipulate, the mass psychology of an entire nation back into conformity with its vision of what the American life should be The strategy will be to speak of the greatness of America to those who feel insignificant; to speak of patriotic commitment to those who feel isolated and contused. The long range goal is to convince people that the problems facing America can be solved by existing institutions.

We have an American religion; we do believe in a lot of things together.

If America is an idea, which it is - we're not a nation of ethnic groups that say we're Americans because we have American blood; we have the blood of every nation in our veins - and there's something really beautiful about that, but it means that we are an idea and that we all have to buy into this idea.

There's something really beautiful about people from all different walks of life... who are bound together by this big idea about American identity and American unity and American interests.

We can remember what brings us together as a country.

In the eyes of government we are just one race here. It is American.

Remember, we are all one country now. Dismiss from your mind all sectional feeling, and bring them up to be Americans.

What kind of people do we wish to become, and how do we know an American when we see one? Is it possible to pursue a common purpose without a common history or a standard text?

A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man of his bones. But if you break a person's nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it set again.

I think if you live in a country, basically you share the dominant values of a country although you may disagree on issues all the time.

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

Patriotism is the secret resource of a successful society.

Anti-Americanism from abroad would not be such a problem if Americans were united in standing up for their own country.

Citizens, regardless of their political inclinations, carry a devout sense of their shared culture and its temperament - and, having contributed to it all their lives, hold decent and reasonable hopes for its continued integrity.