“I was just reading something last night from the state of California. And that the California universities — it's several, I think it's seven or eight of the California system of universities don't even teach an American history course. It's not even available to be taught. Just to tell you how bad it’s gotten in this country, where we're trying to disconnect the American people from the roots of who we are, so they have an understanding of what America should be.”

“Someone tried to tell me the other day that the only habitable place in America is California. But I just don’t understand how you could spend your life restricted to summer outfits.”

“But not in my family. My mother and father (with immigrant pragmatism) assumed the American tongue would reinvent their children. Just so did several immigrant Hispanic mothers in Southern California recently remark their children’s reluctance to join America. These mothers feared their children were not swimming in the American current—not in the swifts and not in the depths; not even in the pop. They blamed “bilingual education,” a leaky boat theorem ostensibly designed to sink into the American current. (In fact, the theorem became a bureacracy preoccupied with prolonging itself.) These few mothers organized an opposition to bilingual education and eventually they sank the Armada in California. Theirs was an American impulse: to engage the American flow directly and to let their children be taken by it.”

“But I also see a problem where a lot of people don't believe in the American idea anymore. The condition of your birth doesn't determine the outcome of your life. This is America, you can make it. You work hard, play by the rules, you can rise, you can do well. That's what we're taught, that's what we believe, that's what we think of as America. Problem is, there are just generations of people in this country who do not think that.”

“Perez Brignoli, Hector. A Brief History of Central America. Translated by Ricardo B. Sawrey and Susana Strettridi Sawrey. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.”

“Marina toured the country for Underwood and was given a full scholarship to the University of California at Berkeley—the first Latina ever to have such a scholarship—and she’d graduated with honors.”

“[On the Yes California secession movement] I love this country too much to even consider an exit. I want to be a part of an America that continues to stand up for all of us, not bail on all our friends across the country.”

“Pride is a powerful force. The pride that kept so many men in California. They want to go home. But I can't go until I've got something to prove my success. They've been reading about success back home. I know, says the miner, how many people are failing. Failure is the most common fact of life in California. They don't know that. How can I go home a failure, when they expect me to come home a success? So they stay.”

“America is dealing death, not only to people of other lands, but to its own people. So say the most thoughtful and passionate of our youth, from California to Connecticut.”

“Anyway, my fellow Americans, this is an amazing moment for me. To think that a once-scrawny boy from Austria could grow up to become governor of the state of California and then stand here…then stand here in Madison Square Garden and speak on behalf of the president of the United States -- that is an immigrant's dream. It is the American dream.”