about an extraordinary capacity for wonder
"To make a government requires no great prudence. Settle the seat of power; teach obedience: and the work is done. To give freedom is still more easy. It is not necessary to guide; it only requires to let go the rein. But to form a free government; that is, to temper together these opposite elements of liberty and restraint in one consistent work, requires much thought, deep reflection, a sagacious, powerful, and combining mind."
Edmund Burke
"Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing."
Theodore Roosevelt
"The happy Union of these States is a wonder; their Constitution a miracle; their example the hope of Liberty throughout the world."
James Madison
I’ve had an abiding affection for the United States that I can’t quite articulate. But for now, God Bless America.
Lest we forget.
"
[American history] is the most romantic of all histories. It began in myth and has developed through centuries of fairy stories. Whatever the time is in America it is always, at every moment, the mad and wayward hour when the prince is finding the little foot that alone fits into the slipper of glass. It is a little hard to know what romantic means to those who use the word umbrageously. But if the mad, impossible voyage of Columbus or Cartier or La Salle or Coronado or John Ledyard is not romantic, if the stars did not dance in the sky when our Constitutional Convention met, if Atlantis has any landscape stranger or the other side of the moon any lights or colours or shapes more unearthly than the customary homespun of Lincoln and the morning coat of Jackson, well, I don’t know what romance is.
Ours is a story mad with the impossible, it is by chaos out of dream and it has continued as dream down to the last headlines you read in a newspaper. And of our dream there are two things above all others to be said, that only madmen could have dreamed them or would have dared to — and that we have shown a considerable faculty for making them come true.
"Bernard De Voto
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
"Reagan did not believe that people in countries such as Hungary should simply settle for the leaders they had or the soul-crushing life they offered. Reagan saw the American Way not as simply one choice out of many possible options. For him, the American Way was the best way, the right way. He believed that American democracy was exceptional, and that citizens around the world deserved a chance to live life free from poisonous government control."
Rudy Giuliani
(Source: thetimes.co.uk)
