I have only one yardstick by which I test every major problem – and that yardstick is: Is it good for America?

Our heritage and ideals, our code and standards – the things we live by and teach our children – are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas and feelings.

Unlike many of its European neighbors, Britain shares many of America’s financial traits.

I’ve never seen America as an imperialist or colonialist or meddling country.

I think it matters whether someone has a good heart.

I have one yardstick by which I test every major problem – and that yardstick is: Is it good for America?

I am the son of a freedom fighter, and a son of a freedom fighter automatically imbibes the value of democracy.

No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.

Most people spend more time and energy going around problems than in trying to solve them.

I don’t believe in killing whatever the reason!

Just as your car runs more smoothly and requires less energy to go faster and farther when the wheels are in perfect alignment, you perform better when your thoughts, feelings, emotions, goals, and values are in balance.

We can have no ’50-50′ allegiance in this country. Either a man is an American and nothing else, or he is not an American at all.

The magic of America is that we’re a free and open society with a mixed population. Part of our security is our freedom.

Human life is far more important than just getting to the top of a mountain.

If we love our country, we should also love our countrymen.

Unfortunately, after Sept. 11, there was an outburst in America of intense suffering and patriotism, and the Bush administration was very shrewd and effective in painting anyone who disagreed with the policies as unpatriotic or even traitorous.

Patriot: the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about.

The only definition by which America’s best days are behind it is on a purely relative basis.

In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.

The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission.

I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.

To summarize, draft resistance can make use of the inegalitarian nature of American society as a technique for increasing the cost of American aggression, and it threatens values that are important to those in a decision-making position.

My dream is of a place and a time where America will once again be seen as the last best hope of earth.

America was indebted to immigration for her settlement and prosperity. That part of America which had encouraged them most had advanced most rapidly in population, agriculture and the arts.

I don’t think anything about a personal legacy. I mean, those words would never come out of my mouth unless I just repeated them. Those things have never been important to me.

If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it.

Teach us that wealth is not elegance, that profusion is not magnificence, that splendor is not beauty.

Only a man’s character is the real criterion of worth.

I’m always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven’t thought of doing yet.

After a century of trying, we declared that healthcare in America is not a privilege for a few, it is a right for everybody. After decades of talk, we finally began to wean ourselves off foreign oil. We doubled our production of clean energy. We brought more of our troops home to their families, and we delivered justice to Osama bin Laden.

We have to rediscover the eternal values and then live them out.

I feel like you get more bees with honey. But that doesn’t mean I don’t get frustrated in my life. My way of dealing with frustration is to shut down and to think and speak logically.

Cowardice asks the question, is it safe? Expediency asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? But conscience asks the question, is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because it is right.

Our problems are man-made, therefore they may be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings.

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. 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.

Everything I have, my career, my success, my family, I owe to America.

Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state.

You’ve got to work things out in the cloakroom, and when you’ve got them worked out, you can debate a little before you vote.

‚My country, right or wrong‘ is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying ‚My mother, drunk or sober.‘

I’ve said this time and again: My greatest concern coming into the White House was making sure my girls came out whole and normal, and decent and kind, just like I would expect them to if we were living on the South Side of Chicago. And it takes work to keep White House life normal for the kids.

There are seasons in every country when noise and impudence pass current for worth; and in popular commotions especially, the clamors of interested and factious men are often mistaken for patriotism.

In Britain, like most of the developed world, stem-cell research is regarded as a great opportunity. America will be left behind if it doesn’t change policy.

I don’t think the Christian Right dominates America in the way some in the media believe they do.

I just know what is right and I want to do what is right.

You know that being an American is more than a matter of where your parents came from. It is a belief that all men are created free and equal and that everyone deserves an even break.

In America, there might be better gastronomic destinations than New Orleans, but there is no place more uniquely wonderful.

I think America has always been polarized.

Humanitarianism consists in never sacrificing a human being to a purpose.

It has always been my belief that a man should do his best, regardless of how much he receives for his services, or the number of people he may be serving or the class of people served.

Without a moral framework, there is nothing left but immediate self-indulgence by some and the path of least resistance by others. Neither can sustain a free society.

Material things ain’t nothing. You feel me? At the end of the day, it’s who you is. You wasn’t born with it; you gon‘ die without it.

Without feelings of respect, what is there to distinguish men from beasts?

There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.

High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.

I think that growing up in a crowded continent like Europe with an awful lot of competing claims, ideas… cultures… and systems of thought, we have, perforce, developed a more sophisticated notion of what the word ‚freedom‘ means than I see much evidence of in America.

Unless we place our religion and our treasure in the same thing, religion will always be sacrificed.

The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.

The thing I really care about is the mission, making the world open.

The people made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been worse off today if born in Africa instead of America. Put differently, the terrible fate of their ancestors benefitted them.

For just when ideas fail, a word comes in to save the situation.

I’m of the school of thought where, if you can’t sort something out for yourself, no one can help you. Rehab is great for some people but not others.