Alexander Hamilton started the U.S. Treasury with nothing, and that was the closest our country has ever been to being even.

If there is not the war, you don’t get the great general; if there is not a great occasion, you don’t get a great statesman; if Lincoln had lived in a time of peace, no one would have known his name.

We lost the American colonies because we lacked the statesmanship to know the right time and the manner of yielding what is impossible to keep.

My fellow Americans, we are and always will be a nation of immigrants. We were strangers once, too.

I was 22 when JFK was murdered, and I will never recover from it… Never.

In the absence of sound oversight, responsible businesses are forced to compete against unscrupulous and underhanded businesses, who are unencumbered by any restrictions on activities that might harm the environment, or take advantage of middle-class families, or threaten to bring down the entire financial system.

Do you realize the responsibility I carry? I’m the only person standing between Richard Nixon and the White House.

The rich are always going to say that, you know, just give us more money and we’ll go out and spend more and then it will all trickle down to the rest of you. But that has not worked the last 10 years, and I hope the American public is catching on.

The Federal Reserve has an official commitment to two different policies. One is to prevent inflation from getting too high. The second is to maintain high employment… the European Central Bank has only the first. It has no commitment to keep employment up.

We Americans… bear the ark of liberties of the world.

The last thing you want to do is raise taxes in the middle of the recession because that would just suck up and take more demand out of the economy and put businesses in a further hole.

Do you think that when they asked George Washington for ID that he just whipped out a quarter?

America’s experience, like many others, teaches us that fostering entrepreneurship is not just about crafting the right economic policy or developing the best educated curricula. It’s about creating an entire climate in which innovation and ideas flourish.

Unions did in fact build the middle class. And here’s what that did. That built the United States of America as we know it.

I cannot swallow whole the view of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator.

I’d read up on the history of our country and I’d become fascinated with the story of the Alamo. To me it represented the fight for freedom, not just in America, but in all countries.

I’m the only person of distinction who has ever had a depression named for him.

The 1950s and 1960s had been a period of enormous growth, the highest in American history, maybe in economic history.

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.

When Henry Ford made cheap, reliable cars people said, ‚Nah, what’s wrong with a horse?‘ That was a huge bet he made, and it worked.

There certainly is a case to be made that taxes should be more progressive.

We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

We also can’t try to take over and rebuild every country that falls into crisis. That’s not leadership; that’s a recipe for quagmire, spilling American blood and treasure that ultimately weakens us. It’s the lesson of Vietnam, of Iraq – and we should have learned it by now.

I think if we go back and check our record, the Negro has proven beyond a doubt that we have been more than patient in seeking our rights as American citizens.

The call for debt cancellation is welcome, but debt does not just go away.

We have got to change our ethics and our financial system and our whole way of understanding the world. It has to be a world in which people live rather than die; a sustainable world. It could be great.

The main message of Climate Revolution is that climate change is caused by the rotten financial system we’ve got, designed to create poverty and rip off any profits for a small amount of rich people. Meanwhile, it destroys the earth.

Economic medicine that was previously meted out by the cupful has recently been dispensed by the barrel. These once unthinkable dosages will almost certainly bring on unwelcome after-effects. Their precise nature is anyone’s guess, though one likely consequence is an onslaught of inflation.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

My idea, as the whole world knows, is that the capitalist system now doesn’t work either for the United States or the world, driving it from crisis to crisis, which are each time more serious.

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.

It is unnecessary to say that Fidel Castro possesses the high qualities of a fighter and statesman: our path, our struggle, and our triumph we owed to his vision.

I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.

No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.

We don’t have to guess what Mitt Romney would have done if he were president. Because he told us. He said we should let foreclosures – and I quote – ‚hit the bottom‘ so the market could – I quote – ‚run its course.‘

I grew up with J. Edgar Hoover. He was the G-man, a hero to everybody, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation was the big, feared organization. He was ahead of his time as far as building up forensic evidence and fingerprinting. But he took down a lot of innocent people, too.

There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.

Here was buried Thomas Jefferson Author of the Declaration of American Independence Of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom & Father of the University of Virginia.

William Gladstone has not a single redeeming defect.

I once told Nixon that the Presidency is like being a jackass caught in a hail storm. You’ve got to just stand there and take it.

The time is near at hand which must determine whether Americans are to be free men or slaves.

What we have to find is the right level of regulation of our financial system so that it has the incentive to invest in things, but at the same time, it is sufficiently regulated so it can’t get in the kind of trouble that we have seen in the past and we have seen recently.

Credit is a system whereby a person who can not pay gets another person who can not pay to guarantee that he can pay.

We Americans think, in every country in transition, there’s a Thomas Jefferson hiding behind some rock or a James Madison beyond one sand dune.