“You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness. You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism.”
As quoted in 50 Ways to Stand Up for America : Put the Spirit of July 4th Into Everyday Life (2002) by W. B. Freeman
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Erma Bombeck 64
When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope… 1927–1996Related quotes
“Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.”
2012, Yangon University Speech (November 2012)
General Robert E. Lee, Part IV, CH 5: Longsteet, p.361
The Killer Angels (1974)
“A Soldier should never have to hide their family. The strength of our Soldiers is our families.”
Army Times, September 2, 2012.
Varanasi 5th Public Talk (28 November 1964), The Collected Works, Vol. XV
1960s
Context: You know, actually we have no love — that is a terrible thing to realize. Actually we have no love; we have sentiment; we have emotionality, sensuality, sexuality; we have remembrances of something which we have thought as love. But actually, brutally, we have no love. Because to have love means no violence, no fear, no competition, no ambition. If you had love you will never say, "This is my family." You may have a family and give them the best you can; but it will not be "your family" which is opposed to the world. If you love, if there is love, there is peace. If you loved, you would educate your child not to be a nationalist, not to have only a technical job and look after his own petty little affairs; you would have no nationality. There would be no divisions of religion, if you loved. But as these things actually exist — not theoretically, but brutally — in this ugly world, it shows that you have no love. Even the love of a mother for her child is not love. If the mother really loved her child, do you think the world would be like this? She would see that he had the right food, the right education, that he was sensitive, that he appreciated beauty, that he was not ambitious, greedy, envious. So the mother, however much she may think she loves her child, does not love the child. So we have not that love.
Appeal to the military to not participate in the coup attempt, while standing on a tank during troop movements against the Russian White House. (19 August 1991)
1990s
