Quotes about America

We have heard much of the phrase, peace and friendship. This phrase, in expressing the aspiration of America, is not complete. We should say instead, peace and friendship, in freedom. This, I think, is America's real message to the rest of the world.

But the biggest thing that has happened in the world in my life, in our lives, is this: By the grace of God, America won the Cold War.

I believe no challenge is more important to the character of America than restoring the right to life to all human beings.

Am I the only one who gets embarrassed when religious leaders in America talk about having prayer in public schools? We don't have even that much prayer in many churches! Out of humility, you would think we would keep quiet on that particular subject until we practice what we preach in our own congregations.

America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense… human rights invented America.

If I were to look at the church of Jesus Christ in America today, I would say our greatest problem is not that we lack the resources to do things, not that we lack the models, the programs, and the plans, but that we lack conformity to the image of Jesus Christ.

America is the first great experiment in Protestant social formation. Protestantism in Europe always assumed and depended on the cultural habits that had been created by Catholic Christianity.

Protesting is good, but healing is better. We need to see America heal.

France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter - it was the graves at Shiloh and the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, and the country boys dying in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart.

It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York—and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land.

Whatever America's founders believed about Christianity - and they believed a wide range of things - they clearly rejected the idea of an established church.

The greatest hope most Americans - including Republicans - had when Barack Obama was elected president was that the election of a black person as the country's president would reduce, if not come close to eliminating, the racial tensions that have plagued America for generations.