'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.'
Your seed has been covered with so many layers of culture, etiquitte, education, religion, country, that you have completely forgotten that you are here to grow, that you have become a lush green bush full of flowers, fragrance, dancing in the wind and in the rain and in the sun.
USA have got a comprehensive strategy to not only chase down the Al Qaida, wherever it exists - but to make sure that countries that harbor terrorists are held to account.
Politics in this country [USA] is always tough. It's always contentious, because this is a big country and a diverse country, and people have strong points of view, and we've got a great diversity of interests.
I've set a clear doctrine: America makes no distinction between the terrorists and the countries that harbor them. If you harbor a terrorist, you're just as guilty as the terrorists, and you're an enemy of the United States of America.
I applaud the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act. This was discrimination enshrined in law. It treated loving, committed gay and lesbian couples as a separate and lesser class of people. The Supreme Court has righted that wrong, and our country is better off for it. We are a people who declared that we are all created equal - and the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.
Now, I confess myself as belonging to that class in the country who contemplate slavery as a moral, social and political evil, having due regard for its actual existence amongst us and the difficulties of getting rid of it in any satisfactory way, and to all the constitutional obligations which have been thrown about it; but, nevertheless, desire a policy that looks to the prevention of it as a wrong, and looks hopefully to the time when as a wrong it may come to an end.
The greater speed and success that distinguish the planting of the human race in this country, over all other plantations in history, owe themselves mainly to the new subdivisions of the State into small corporations of land and power.
A Christian's first duty is to God. It then follows, as a matter of course, that it is his duty to carry his Christian code to the polls and vote them... If Christians should vote their duty to God at the polls, they would carry every election, and do it with ease... it would bring about a moral revolution that would be incalculably beneficent. It would save the country.
California ... is the place that sets the trends and establishes the values for the rest of the country; like a slow ooze, California culture spreads eastward across the land.
The principle I believe in is the principle of protecting our nation. I believe that the United States has the right to attack any country it views as a threat at a time and place of its choosing.
Whether our forebears were strangers who crossed the Atlantic or the Pacific or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like, or what our last names are, or how we worship.
I think the American people have a generous instinct. They understand that we're a nation of immigrants. But if those folks are going to live in this country, they have to be put on a pathway to citizenship that involves them paying a fine, making sure that they are at the back of the line and not cutting in front of people who applied legally to come into the country.
Think about it: Iran, Cuba, Venezuela - these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don't pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us.
The world must understand that it is the time to come together to address the root cause of the problem, and the problem is you have a state within a state. You had people launch attacks on a sovereign nation without the consent of the government in the country in which they are lodged.
We played in Texas about a year ago, at Emo's, the famous country and western club in Austin. And I figured, well, if I'm finally gonna die onstage, that's where it's going to be!