Rhetoric is a poor substitute for action, and we have trusted only to rhetoric. If we are really to be a great nation, we must not merely talk; we must act big.
Precisely because our political speeches are meant to be reported, they are not worth reporting. Precisely because they are carefully designed to be read, nobody reads them.
There's such an aggressively apolitical movement in the US that anything that smells of being political - even the term "political" is so ridiculous, when you think about it. The worst part of governing, the political side, is the grossest part, so that's what they call it. So anything that reeks of that immediately gets tuned out by 70 percent of the population.
There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.