American Quotes

The American people do not stand alone in the world in their desire for change. We seek it through tested liberal traditions, through processes which retain all of the deep essentials of that republican form of representative government first given to a troubled world by the United States.

It is the self-reliant pioneer in every enterprise who beats the path along which American civilization has marched. Such individual effort is the glory of America.

We rejoice especially in the prosperity, the stability and the independence of all of the American Republics.

If we can boondoggle ourselves out of this depression, that word is going to be enshrined in the hearts of the American people for years to come.

In our American unity, we will pursue two obvious and simultaneous courses; we will extend to the opponents of force the material resources of this nation.

Upon our naval and air patrol - now operating in large number over a vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean - falls the duty of maintaining the American policy of freedom of the seas.

We must especially beware of that small group of selfish men who would clip the wings of the American Eagle in order to feather their own nests.

I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a New Deal for the American People.

Among American citizens, there should be no forgotten men and no forgotten races.

I never forget that I live in a house owned by all the American people and that I have been given their trust.

Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves and the only way they could do this is by not voting.

The best customer of American industry is the well paid worker.

Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.

It will never be possible for any length of time for any group of the American people, either by reason of wealth or learning or inheritance or economic power, to retain any mandate, any permanent authority to arrogate to itself the political control of American public life.

More striking still, it appeared that, if the process of concentration goes on at the same rate, at the end of another century we shall have all American industry controlled by a dozen corporations and run by perhaps a hundred men. Put plainly, we are steering a steady course toward economic oligarchy, if we are not there already.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity. But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free.

Now that the mistake of the past has been made, I think that the opportunity of the future is to really go out and to transform American society, and where else is there a better place than in the institution that should serve as the moral guardian of the community.

Many of the ugly pages of American history have been obscured and forgotten. A society is always eager to cover misdeeds with a cloak of forgetfulness, but no society can fully repress an ugly past when the ravages persist into the present.

I have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day, right down in Georgia and Mississippi and Alabama, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to live together as brothers.

One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land.