Sitting at the table doesn't make you a diner, unless you eat some of what's on that plate. Being here in America doesn't make you an American. Being born here in America doesn't make you an American.
Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.
America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.
The Constitution shall never be construed...to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms.
Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: First a right to life, secondly to liberty, and thirdly to property; together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can.
Driven from every other corner of the earth, freedom of thought and the right of private judgment in matters of conscience direct their course to this happy country as their last resort.
The government at Washington does live. It lives in the pages of our Constitution and in the hearts of our citizens, and there it will always be safe.
We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
On account of being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only nation in the world that has to keep a government four years, no matter what it does.
Four years ago, some said the world had grown calm, and many assumed that the United States was invulnerable to danger. That thought might have been comforting; it was also false. Like other generations of Americans, we soon discovered that history had great and unexpected duties in store for us.
The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
We will always remember. We will always be proud. We will always be prepared, so we may always be free.
The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.