Had it not been for the Atlantic Ocean and the virgin wilderness, the United States would never have been the Land of Promise.

I am not a prophet in any sense of the word, and I entertain an active and intense dislike of the foregoing mixture of optimism, fatalism, and conservatism.

The national school is not a lecture hall or a library. Its schooling consists chiefly in experimental collective action aimed at the realization of a collective purpose.

The average American is nothing if not patriotic.

The higher American patriotism, on the other hand, combines loyalty to historical tradition and precedent with the imaginative projection of an ideal national Promise.

Unless the great majority of Americans not only have, but believe they have, a fair chance, the better American future will be dangerously compromised.

The adoption by Jefferson and the Republicans of the political structure of their opponents is of an importance hardly inferior to that of the adoption of the Constitution by the states.

The only fruitful promise of which the life of any individual or any nation can be possessed, is a promise determined by an ideal.

Of course, Americans have no monopoly of patriotic enthusiasm and good faith.

So far I, at least, have no fault to find with implications of Hamilton's Federalism, but unfortunately his policy was in certain other respects tainted with a more doubtful tendency.

The first phase of American political history was characterized by the conflict between the Federalists and the Republicans, and it resulted in the complete triumph of the latter.

We believed in the existence in this country of a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price and staked everything on it.

I’m still waiting for something, searching for something I cannot describe.”“It’s called true love. Most people never find it.

Best of the conversations are sometimes made in silence..

Computers tend to separate us from each other - Mum's on the laptop, Dad's on the iPad, teenagers are on Facebook, toddlers are on the DS, and so on.

You know Beyoncé, man. She's very quiet about how she does things. She doesn't like to let everybody know what she's about to do.

No more duty can be urged upon those who are entering the great theater of life than simple loyalty to their best convictions.

Forcing victims of sexual harassment into secret arbitration proceedings is wrong because it means that nobody ever finds out what really happened.

The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me Cruelly, being barren. Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.

I have to strive to go two steps forward and realize that, sometimes, there will be one step back.