2015, Naturalization Ceremony speech (December 2015)
Source: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
2015, State of the Union Address (January 2015)
2010s, 2015, Speech on (20 July 2015)
Comment after winning re-election — [Giffords wins re-election to U.S. House; Kelly says voters have spoken, Sierra Vista Herald, Arizona, November 6, 2010, Bill Hess]
2015, Naturalization Ceremony speech (December 2015)
Context: We celebrate this history, this heritage, as an immigrant nation. And we are strong enough to acknowledge, as painful as it may be, that we haven’t always lived up to our own ideals. We haven’t always lived up to these documents. [... ] We succumbed to fear. We betrayed not only our fellow Americans, but our deepest values. We betrayed these documents. It’s happened before. And the biggest irony of course was -- is that those who betrayed these values were themselves the children of immigrants. How quickly we forget. One generation passes, two generation passes, and suddenly we don’t remember where we came from. And we suggest that somehow there is “us” and there is “them,” not remembering we used to be “them.”
2000s, 2009, Farewell speech to the nation (January 2009)
1960s, Remarks at the signing of the Immigration Bill (1965)
“Our times are still not safe and sane enough
for faces to show ordinary sorrow.”
"Smiles"
Poems New and Collected (1998), A Large Number (1976)
Context: The going's rough, and so we need the laugh
of bright incisors, molars of goodwill.
Our times are still not safe and sane enough
for faces to show ordinary sorrow.
1990s, A Period of Consequences (September 1999)
