Quotes about homeland

page 12

“Ninety-eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hard-working, honest Americans. It's the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then--we elected them.”

“The meaning of life has not much to do with good and evil, right and wrong, duty, honor, country, or any of that.

It has to do with cutting the right deal.”

“People are fond of using military terms to describe what they do.
We call it bombing when we go out painting, when of course it's more
like entertaining the troops in a neutral zone, during peacetime in a
country without an army.”

“I hope we shall… crush in it’s birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country”

“I don't believe there's any problem in this country, no matter how tough it is, that Americans, when they roll up their sleeves, can't completely ignore.”

“I thought that a man can be an enemy of other men, of the moments of other men, but not of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams of water, sunsets.”

“The great corporation which employed you lied to you, and lied to the whole country—from top to bottom it was nothing but one gigantic lie.”

“I'm very depressed how in this country you can be told "That's offensive" as though those two words constitute an argument.”

“He could tell her he loved her. He ached to shout it out loud for the gods and everyone to hear. Little good it would do. Better to trust in the moon's promises than in the word of the Thief of Eddis. He was famous in three countries for his lies.”

“A country that demands moral perfection in its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security.”

“It is a bad sign when the people of a country stop identifying themselves with the country and start identifying with a group. A racial group. Or a religion. Or a language. Anything, as long as it isn't the whole population.”

“Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience—buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello—become new all over again.”

“Without debate, without criticism, no Administration and no country can succeed — and no republic can survive.”

“In all times, and all countries especially in those countries which are divided within by religious faith, there are always fanatics who will be well contented to be regarded as martyrs.”

“Without a sign, his sword the brave man draws, and asks no omen, but his country's cause.”

“Some say it's too country, some say it's too rock n' roll. But it's just good music if you can feel it in your soul.”

“Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.”

“I believe that children in this country need a more robust literary diet than they are getting…. I will never talk down to, or draw down to, children.”

“When I am abroad I always make it a rule never to criticize or attack the Government of my country. I make up for lost time when I am at home.”

“No matter how dreary and gray our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful. There is no place like home.”

“It may sound corny, but what's wrong with wanting to fight for your country. Why are people reluctant to use the word patriotism?”

“If we would spend on education half the amount of money that we currently lavish on sports and entertainment, we could provide complete and free education for every student in this country.”

“All I really want is enough to live on, a little house in the country… and a tree in the garden with seven of my enemies hanging in it.”

“Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it…”

“War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to 'feel good' about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.”

“It is important for this country to make its people so obsessed with their own liberal individualism that they do not have time to think about a world larger than self.”

“Guns are our friends because in a country without guns, I'm what's known as "prey." All females are.”

“I love Canada… It is a great country much too cold for good sense, inhabited by compassionate, intelligent people with bad hairdos.”

“Birthdays could be such a bummer when you were older than the country you lived in.”

“It’s bad enough… when a country gets colonized, but when the people do as well! That’s the end, really, that’s the end.”

“Your fey cousin here has the miraculous ability to hold his liquor--and mine, and yours, and the king's, and half the country's, I expect.”

“I don't like people who like me because I'm a Negro; neither do I like people who find in the same accident grounds for contempt. I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one's own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright.”

“A country cannot subsist well without liberty, nor liberty without virtue.”

“He’s body slammed enough people to start a new country. And there could be a neighbouring city for the people he’s punched in the throat”

“The love of one's country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border? There is a brotherhood among all men. This must be recognized if life is to remain. We must learn the love of man.”

“I look forward to a great future for America, a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose. I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty, which will protect the beauty of our natural environment, which will preserve the great old American houses and squares and parks of our national past, and which will build handsome and balanced cities for our future.”

“God is at home. We are in the far country.”

“In the end we had the pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained, oddly shaped emptinesses mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn't name.”

“They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for ones country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.”

“A country that does not know how to read and write is easy to deceive.”

“Splendid to arrive alone in a foreign country and feel the assault of difference. Here they are all along, busy with living; they don't talk or look like me. The rhythm of their day is entirely different; I am foreign.”

“That’s what religion does. It points a finger. It causes wars. It breaks apart countries. It’s a petri dish for stereotypes to grow in. Religion’s not about being holy… Just holier-than-thous.”

“I'll pray that you grow up a brave man in a brave country. I will pray you find a way to be useful.


I'll pray, and then I'll sleep.”

“If they [presidents] can't do it to their wives, they do it to their country.”

“Way out in the country tonight he could smell the pumpkins ripening toward the knife and the triangle eye and the singeing candle.”

“In poor countries, officials receive explicit bribes; in D. C. they get the sophisticated, implicit, unspoken promise to work for large corporations”

“Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.”

“Every thinking person fears nuclear war and every technological nation plans for it. Everyone knows it's madness, and every country has an excuse.”

“She turns to us, acts surprised to see us, then does the bit with the back of the hand to the forehead. "You're lost!" "You're angry!" "You're in the wrong school!" "You're in the wrong country!" "You're on the wrong planet!”

“Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window.”

“In many respects, the United States is a great country. Freedom of speech is protected more than in any other country. It is also a very free society. In America, the professor talks to the mechanic. They are in the same category.”

“You can cover a great deal of country in books.”

“It's a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA.”

“She had been proud of his decision to serve his country, her heart bursting with love and admiration the first time she saw him outfitted in his dress blues.”

“The way I see it, anyone who's proud of their country is either a thug or just hasn't read enough history yet.”

“A guitar twanged from the far-off radio. Country music. Damn. They'd resorted to torture already.”

“The car suddenly veered off the road and we came to a sliding halt in the gravel. I was hurled against the dashboard. My attorney was slumped over the wheel. “What’s wrong?” I yelled. “We can’t stop here. This is bat country!”

“There are no borders in this struggle to the death. We cannot be indifferent to what happens anywhere in the world, because a victory by any country over imperialism is our victory, just as any country's defeat is a defeat for all of us.”

“The value of your travels does not hinge on how many stamps you have in your passport when you get home -- and the slow nuanced experience of a single country is always better than the hurried, superficial experience of forty countries.”

“It is said that in some countries trees will grow, but will bear no fruit because there is no winter there.”

“Men like women who write, even though they don't say so. A writer is a foreign country.”

“How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.”

“Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.”

“Americans continue to rapidly homogenize ourselves into a neutered oblivion. For a country founded on the protection of the unique, we relish our sameness.”

“Living with him is like being told a perpetual story: his mind is the biggest, most imaginative I have ever met. I could live in its growing countries forever.”

“Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.”

“How different each death is, and yet it leads us into the self-same country, that country which we inhabit so rarely, where we see the worthlessness of what we have long pursued and will so soon return to pursuing.”

“every man has a map in his heart of his own country and that the heart will never allow you to forget this map. (p. 18)”

“Patriotism is easy to understand in America; it means looking out for yourself by looking out for your country.”

“Here on the pulse of this new day
You may have the grace to look up and out
And into your sister's eyes,
Into your brother's face, your country
And say simply
Very simply
With hope
Good morning.”

“I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means 'put down'.”

“Healthy citizens are the greatest asset any country can have.”

“Vote, v. The instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.”

“I think in our desire to create a better America, we have to have civilized debate in this country and not just yelling.”

“Racism is so universal in this country, so widespread, and deep-seated, that it is invisible because it is so normal.”

“If only I could visit you as a foreigner goes into a new country, learn the language of you, wander past all borders into every private and secret place, I would stay forever. I would become a citizen of you.”

“When politicians start talking about large groups of their fellow Americans as 'enemies,' it's time for a quiet stir of alertness. Polarizing people is a good way to win an election, and also a good way to wreck a country.”

“There are songs that come free from the blue-eyed grass, from the dust of a thousand country roads. This is one of them.”

“a writer is a foreign country”

“Health makes good propaganda. “'Proof' that women's activities outside the home are detrimental to the health and welfare of themselves, their families and the country as a whole” lent impetus, writes Ann Oakley, to the nineteenth-century cult of domesticity. The ovaries were seen as collective property rather than the woman's own business, as the face and body outline are seen today. Who can argue with health?”

“Why was it, Lloyd wondered, that the people who wanted to destroy everything good about their country were the quickest to wave the national flag?”

“This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.”

“The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards.”

“When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done”

“This won't look so good in my obituary," Schaffer said dolefully. There was a perceptible edge of strain under the lightly-spoken words."Gave his life for his country in a ladies' lavatory in Upper Bavaria.”

“These young men and women, longing to socialize their democracy, are animated by certain hopes which may be thus loosely formulated; that if in a democratic country nothing can be permanently achieved save through the masses of the people, it will be impossible to establish a higher political life than the people themselves crave; that it is difficult to see how the notion of a higher civic life can be fostered save through common intercourse; that the blessings which we associate with a life of refinement and cultivation can be made universal and must be made universal if they are to be permanent; that the good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain, is floating in mid-air, until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.”

“Rose doesn’t like the flat country, but I always did – flat country seems to give the sky such a chance.”

“We is in Dream Country,' the BFG said. 'This is where all dreams is beginning.”

“He had fallen in love with this wild, beautiful country and everything it contained. It was the kind of love people dream of having with other people: selfless and free of doubt, reverent and everlasting.”

“Well, the correct answer is he is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country?”

“So long as this country is cursed with slavery, so too will it be cursed with vampires.”

“The leaves fall, the wind blows, and the farm country slowly changes from the summer cottons into its winter wools.”

“The invisible is only another unexplored country, a brave new world.”

“I don't think you fully understand the public, my friend; in this country, when something is out of order, then the quickest way to get it fixed is the best way.”

“She even learnt the language of a strange country which Senior Cosetti had been told some people believed still existed, although no-one in the world could say where it was. The name of this country was Wales.”

“When you go to a country, you must learn how to say two things: how to ask for food, and to tell a woman that you love her. Of these the second is more important, for if you tell a woman you love her, she will certainly feed you.”

“I am the son of the road, my country is a caravan and my life is the most unexpected of voyages. i belong to earth and to the god and it is to them that I will one day soon return”

“What the country needs is dirtier fingernails and cleaner minds.”

“When a country is well governed, poverty and a mean condition are things to be ashamed of. When a country is ill governed, riches and honor are things to be ashamed of.”