“I’ve lived here for 20 years and I have been a citizen for 10 years. I hope I am a good one. I know I don’t take it for granted. I feel I am an awfully lucky person to be an American and I think that every naturalized American and every person born in this land should kneel on his knees every morning and utter a prayer for being an American.”

2010s, 2016, July, (21 July 2016)

Marmee March to Jo, in Ch. 8 : Jo Meets Apollyon
Little Women (1868)
Context: You think your temper is the worst in the world, but mine used to be just like it. … I've been trying to cure it for forty years, and have only succeeded in controlling it. I am angry nearly every day of my life, but I have learned not to show it; and I still try to hope not to feel it, though it may take me another forty years to do it. … I've learned to check the hasty words that rise to my lips, and when I feel that they mean to break out against my will, I just go away for a minute, and give myself a little shake for being so weak and wicked.

Speech (July 17, 1850); reported in Edward Everett, ed., The Works of Daniel Webster (1851), p. 437

American "Civilization" (from "Civilta Americana") http://www.juliusevola.net/excerpts/American_%22Civilization%22.html

Conversation: Elon Musk on Wired Science (2007)

The irony being that he is a New Zealand born Australian, who has often made clear his dislike of being in Hollywood.
GQ Interview (2005)
Context: That was the first conversation in my life that I’d ever heard the phrase Al Qaeda. And it was something to do with some recording picked up by a French policewoman, I think, in either Libya or Algiers. And it was a destabilization plan. I don’t think that I was the only person. But it was about—and here’s another little touch of irony— it was about taking iconographic Americans out of the picture as a sort of cultural-destabilization plan.

The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)

pp. 325, Chapter 10: Katrina https://books.google.com/books?id=iUJTvsUGWOcC&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;dq=decision+points&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0CBwQ6AEwAGoVChMImu6s8_WEyAIVjNkeCh1oFgyY#v=onepage&amp;q=kanye&amp;f=false <br class="br">2010s, 2010, Decision Points (November 2010) <br class="br">Context: Kanye West told a prime-time T. V. audience, &quot;George Bush doesn&#x27;t care about black people.&quot; Jesse Jackson later compared the New Orleans Convention Center to the &quot;hull of a slave ship&quot;. A member of the Congressional Black Caucus claimed that if the storm victims had been &quot;white, middle-class Americans&quot; they would have received more help. Five years later, I can barely write those words without feeling disgusted. I am deeply insulted by the suggestion that we allowed American citizens to suffer because they were black. As I told the press at the time, &quot;The storm didn&#x27;t discriminate, and neither will we. When those coast guard choppers, many of whom were first on the scene, were pulling people off roofs, they didn&#x27;t check the color of a person&#x27;s skin.&quot; The more I thought about it, the angrier I felt. I was raised to believe that racism was one of the greatest evils in society. I admired dad&#x27;s courage when he defied near-universal opposition from his constituents to vote for the Open Housing Bill of 1968. I was proud to have earned more black votes than any Republican governor in Texas history. I had appointed African Americans to top government positions, including the first black woman national security adviser and the first two black secretaries of state. It broke my heart to see minority children shuffled through the school system, so I had based my signature domestic policy initiative, the No Child Left Behind Act, on ending the soft bigotry of low expectations. I had launched a $15 billion program to combat HIV/AIDS in Africa. As part of the response to Katrina, my administration worked with Congress to provided historically black colleges and universities in the Gulf Coast with more than $400 million in loans to restore their campuses and renew their recruiting efforts.