Quotes about unit
page 13

Ralph Waldo Emerson photo
Adlai Stevenson photo

“The whole basis of the United Nations is the right of all nations great or small — to have weight, to have a vote, to be attended to, to be a part of the twentieth century.”

Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965) mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the UN

As quoted in "The Bolton Embarrassment" in The Nation (1 August 2005) http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat?pid=9416

Arnold Schwarzenegger photo
Mitt Romney photo

“So we started a new business called Bain Capital. The only problem was, while WE believed in ourselves, nobody else did. We were young and had never done this before and we almost didn't get off the ground. In those days, sometimes I wondered if I had made a really big mistake. I had thought about asking my church's pension fund to invest, but I didn't. I figured it was bad enough that I might lose my investors' money, but I didn't want to go to hell too. Shows what I know. Another of my partners got the Episcopal Church pension fund to invest. Today there are a lot of happy retired priests who should thank him. That business we started with 10 people has now grown into a great American success story. Some of the companies we helped start are names you know. An office supply company called Staples – where I'm pleased to see the Obama campaign has been shopping; The Sports Authority, which became a favorite of my sons. We started an early childhood learning center called Bright Horizons that First Lady Michelle Obama rightly praised. At a time when nobody thought we'd ever see a new steel mill built in America, we took a chance and built one in a corn field in Indiana. Today Steel Dynamics is one of the largest steel producers in the United States.”

Mitt Romney (1947) American businessman and politician

2012-08-31
http://www.npr.org/2012/08/30/160357612/transcript-mitt-romneys-acceptance-speech
Transcript: Mitt Romney's Acceptance Speech
NPR
[2012-08-30, gopconvention2012, Mitt Romney: Introduction (video), YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_cGyPwt5UI]
2012

Rousas John Rushdoony photo
Pat Conroy photo

“Cadets are people. Behind the gray suits, beneath the Pom-pom and Shako and above the miraculously polished shoes, blood flows through veins and arteries, hearts thump in a regular pattern, stomachs digest food, and kidneys collect waste. Each cadet is unique, a functioning unit of his own, a distinct and separate integer from anyone else. Part of the irony of military schools stems from the fact that everyone in these schools is expected to act precisely the same way, register the same feelings, and respond in the same prescribed manner. The school erects a rigid structure of rules from which there can be no deviation. The path has already been carved through the forest and all the student must do is follow it, glancing neither to the right nor left, and making goddamn sure he participates in no exploration into the uncharted territory around him. A flaw exists in this system. If every person is, indeed, different from every other person, then he will respond to rules, regulations, people, situations, orders, commands, and entreaties in a way entirely depending on his own individual experiences. Te cadet who is spawned in a family that stresses discipline will probably have less difficulty in adjusting than the one who comes from a broken home, or whose father is an alcoholic, or whose home is shattered by cruel arguments between the parents. Yet no rule encompasses enough flexibility to offer a break to a boy who is the product of one of these homes.”

Source: The Boo (1970), p. 10

William H. Seward photo
William Kristol photo
Ernest King photo
Patrick Buchanan photo
Alfred de Zayas photo

“Disarmament is not just an idle promise; it is also a commitment under article 26 of the Charter of the United Nations.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Report of the Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order exploring the adverse impacts of military expenditures on the realization of a democratic and equitable international order http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/IntOrder/Pages/Reports.aspx.
2015, Report submitted to the UN Human Rights Council

Lindsey Vonn photo

“I hope to represent the people of the United States, not the president.”

Lindsey Vonn (1984) American alpine skier

Lindsey Vonn: I won't be representing US President at Winter Olympics
CNN
2017-12-07
Christina
Macfarlane
Ursin
Caderas
John
Sinnott
https://edition.cnn.com/2017/12/06/sport/lindsey-vonn-donald-trump-white-house/index.html

Aneurin Bevan photo
Isoroku Yamamoto photo

“Should hostilities once break out between Japan and the United States, it is not enough that we take Guam and the Philippines, nor even Hawaii and San Francisco. To make victory certain, we would have to march into Washington and dictate the terms of peace in the White House. I wonder if our politicians, among whom armchair arguments about war are being glibly bandied about in the name of state politics, have confidence as to the final outcome and are prepared to make the necessary sacrifices.”

Isoroku Yamamoto (1884–1943) Japanese Marshal Admiral

As quoted in At Dawn We Slept (1981) by Gordon W. Prange, p. 11; this quote was stated in a letter to Ryoichi Sasakawa prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Minus the last sentence, it was taken out of context and interpreted in the U.S. as a boast that Japan would conquer the entire contiguous United States. The omitted sentence showed Yamamoto's counsel of caution towards a war that would cost Japan dearly.

Joe Biden photo
Anthony Kennedy photo

“The freedom secured by the Constitution consists, in one of its essential dimensions, of the right of the individual not to be injured by the unlawful exercise of governmental power. The mandate for segregated schools, Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U. S. 483 (1954); a wrongful invasion of the home, Silverman v. United States, 365 U. S. 505 (1961); or punishing a protester whose views offend others, Texas v. Johnson, 491 U. S. 397 (1989); and scores of other examples teach that individual liberty has constitutional protection, and that liberty’s full extent and meaning may remain yet to be discovered and affirmed. Yet freedom does not stop with individual rights. Our constitutional system embraces, too, the right of citizens to debate so they can learn and decide and then, through the political process, act in concert to try to shape the course of their own times and the course of a nation that must strive always to make freedom ever greater and more secure. Here Michigan voters acted in concert and statewide to seek consensus and adopt a policy on a difficult subject against a historical background of race in America that has been a source of tragedy and persisting injustice. That history demands that we continue to learn, to listen, and to remain open to new approaches if we are to aspire always to a constitutional order in which all persons are treated with fairness and equal dignity. Were the Court to rule that the question addressed by Michigan voters is too sensitive or complex to be within the grasp of the electorate; or that the policies at issue remain too delicate to be resolved save by university officials or faculties, acting at some remove from immediate public scru-tiny and control; or that these matters are so arcane that the electorate’s power must be limited because the people cannot prudently exercise that power even after a full debate, that holding would be an unprecedented restriction on the exercise of a fundamental right held not just by one person but by all in common. It is the right to speak and debate and learn and then, as a matter of political will, to act through a lawful electoral process.”

Anthony Kennedy (1936) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, 572 U. S. ____, (2016), plurality opinion.

“In short, the elimination of the financial legacy of Reaganomics could force the United States to make some exceptionally difficult choices indeed.”

Robert Gilpin (1930–2018) Political scientist

Source: The Political Economy of International Relations (1987), Chapter Nine, transformation Of The Global Economy, p. 349

Timothy McVeigh photo

“ATF, all you tyrannical people will swing in the wind one day for your treasonous actions against the Constitution of the United States. Remember the Nuremberg War Trials.”

Timothy McVeigh (1968–2001) American army soldier, security guard, terrorist

As quoted in "Timothy McVeigh & Terry Nichols: Oklahoma Bombing" (2010), TruTv.

George S. Patton photo
George W. Bush photo
Paul Wolfowitz photo

“A new regime would have become the United States’ responsibility. Conceivably, this could have led the United States into a more or less permanent occupation of a country that could not govern itself, but where the rule of a foreign occupier would be increasingly resented.”

Paul Wolfowitz (1943) American politician, diplomat, and technocrat

Quoted in John Calabrese, The future of Iraq http://books.google.ca/books?id=w1MhAAAACAAJ&dq=%22The+Future+of+Iraq (The Middle East Institute, 1997, ISBN 0916808467, 9780916808464).

Donald J. Trump photo

“So, ladies and gentlemen, I am officially running for president of the United States, and we are going to make our country great again!”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2015, Presidential Bid Announcement (June 16, 2015)

Michele Bachmann photo

“Well, I think one thing that we can do, quite simply, is to withhold funding from Planned Parenthood. It's the largest provider of abortion in the United States. They are a billion-dollar industry. As a matter of fact, the head of Planned Parenthood in Illinois said that Planned Parenthood wants to be the LensCrafters of Big Abortion.”

Michele Bachmann (1956) American politician

Terrence P.
Jeffrey
Rep. Michele Bachmann: De-Fund Planned Parenthood
CNSNews
2010-12-06
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/michele-bachmann-can-t-we-minimum-start
2011-04-15
Misquoting Steve Trombley in a 2008 interview with The Wall Street Journal http://www.denverpost.com/ci_9674675 saying "I like to think of it as the LensCrafters of family planning."
2010s

Jane Collins photo
Cesar Chavez photo

“We shall unite. We have learned the meaning of Unity.”

Cesar Chavez (1927–1993) American farm worker, labor leader, and civil rights activist

The Plan of Delano (1965)

George W. Bush photo
Dean Acheson photo
Maxwell D. Taylor photo
Omid Djalili photo
Ernest King photo
Robert A. Dahl photo

“If the Madisonian democratic republicans had been able to foresee the later experience with constitutions in democratic countries, including the experience of the United States, would they have made the choices they made in 1787? I very much doubt it.”

Robert A. Dahl (1915–2014) American political scientist

Foreword : Reflections on A Preface to Democratic Theory
A Preface to Democratic Theory (Expanded ed., 2006)

Rachel Maddow photo
Spiro Agnew photo

“In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism.”

Spiro Agnew (1918–1996) 39th Vice President of the United States

Speech in San Diego (11 September 1970).
Agnew's signature quip against everything perceived to be liberal, particularly the media at that time.

Roger Ebert photo
Hermann Hesse photo
Ted Kennedy photo
Angela Davis photo
Aron Ra photo

“I was born in the richest, most technologically advanced (and consequently the most powerful) country in the world. We were the leaders in science, so of course we had a better economy, and we had a higher standard of living than anyone else at that time. The rest of the globe sent their best and brightest to enroll in our schools because our students were among the most inventive, innovative and involved. Some of the greatest American scientists were the immigrants who stayed and enabled the United States to achieve more than anyone else had in the history of mankind. That's when our secular government still cared about better education. Sadly, that is not the country I still live in. America was number one, but saying that now reminds me of Aesop's fable where the hare is still resting on its laurels long after the tortoise has passed. In the fifty years since I was born, America's rating in science has fallen from number one to number thirty-seven. We have one of the lowest science scores of all countries in the developed world (or first world). Foreign scholars and foreign scientists don't stay here long after graduation (if they come at all), because what sort of environment do we offer intellectuals now? Our own scientists, our own graduate scholars are leaving as well, moving to Europe or Asia where they're more welcome, although an American going abroad now means that he will have to try to live down new stereotype instead of living up to the old one.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Youtube, Other, Don't Blame the Atheists https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0Ca88xNw_w (October 21, 2012)

Max Beerbohm photo

“A crowd, proportionately to its size, magnifies all that in its units pertains to the emotions, and diminishes all that in them pertains to thought.”

Max Beerbohm (1872–1956) English writer

Source: Zuleika Dobson http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext99/zdbsn11.txt (1911), Ch. IX

Daniel J. Boorstin photo
Calvin Coolidge photo

“The magnitude of the service which you rendered to your country and to humanity is beyond estimation. Sharp outlines here and there we know, but the whole account of the World War would be on a scale so stupendous that it could never be recorded. In the victory which was finally gained by you and your foreign comrades, you represented on the battle field the united efforts of our whole people. You were there as the result of a great resurgence of the old American spirit, which manifested itself in a thousand ways, by the pouring out of vast sums of money in credits and charities, by the organization and quickening of every hand in our extended industries, by the expansion of agriculture until it met the demands of famishing continents, by the manufacture of an unending stream of munitions and supplies, by the creation of vast fleets of war and transport ships, and, finally, when the tide of battle was turning against our associates, by bringing into action a great armed force on sea and land of a character that the world had never seen before, which, when it finally took its place in the line, never ceased to advance, carrying the cause of liberty to a triumphant conclusion. You reaffirmed the position of this Nation in the estimation of mankind. You saved civilization from a gigantic reverse. Nobody says now that Americans can not fight.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Toleration and Liberalism (1925)

George W. Bush photo

“…The battle against the Sunnis - Sunni extremists - some of them Saddamists, some of there are al Qaeda, but all of them aiming to try to drive the United States out of Iraq before the job is done.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

Press conference New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/20/washington/20text-bush.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1166734888-gpZmokkpM7BcfwqOc9fJqQ WZZM News http://www.wzzm13.com/news/local/grmetro_article.aspx?storyid=67311 WhiteHouse.gov http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2006/12/20061220-1.html (December 20, 2006)
2000s, 2006

François de La Rochefoucauld photo
Al Gore photo
Louis Pasteur photo
George W. Bush photo
Gore Vidal photo

“The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country — and we haven't seen them since.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

"The State of the Union" (1975)
1970s, Homage to Daniel Shays : Collected Essays (1972), Matters of Fact and Fiction : Essays 1973 - 1976 (1978)

Ralph Bunche photo
André Maurois photo

“There are more love marriages in the United States than in any other country, but Americans are also given to quick and frequent divorces.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Marriage

Benjamin Franklin photo

“There is a great danger for the United States of America. This great danger is the Jew. Gentlemen, in whatever country Jews have settled in any great number, they have lowered its moral tone; depreciated its commercial integrity; have segregated themselves and have not been assimilated; have sneered at and tried to undermine the Christian religion, have built up a state within a state; and when opposed have tried to strangle that country to death financially.
If you do not exclude them from the United States in the Constitution, in less than 200 years they will have swarmed here in such great numbers that they will dominate and devour the land, and change our form of government.
If you do not exclude them, in less than 200 years our descendants will be working in the fields to furnish them substance, while they will be in the counting houses rubbing their hands. I warn you, gentlemen, if you do not exclude the Jews for all time, your children will curse you in your graves. Jews, gentlemen, are Asiatics, let them be born where they will or how many generations they are away from Asia, they will never be otherwise.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …

Claimed by American Fascist William Dudley Pelley in Liberation (February 3, 1934) to have appeared in notes taken at the Constitutional Convention by Charles Cotesworth Pinckney; reported as debunked in Paul F. Boller, Jr., and John George, They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, & Misleading Attributions (1989), p. 26-27, noting that historian Charles A. Beard conducted a thorough investigation of the attribution and found it to be false. The quote appears in no source prior to Pelley's publication, contains anachronisms, and contradicts Franklin's own financial support of the construction of a synagogue in Philadelphia. Many variations of the above have been made, including adding to "the Christian religion" the phrase "upon which this nation was founded, by objecting to its restrictions"; adding to "strangle that country to death financially" the phrase "as in the case of Spain and Portugal". See Michael Feldberg, "The Myth of Ben Franklin's Anti-Semitism, in Blessings of Freedom: Chapters in American Jewish History (2003), p. 134.
Misattributed

Douglas MacArthur photo
David Berg photo
Prem Rawat photo

“If this guy is God, then this is the God that the United States of America deserves.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Abbie Hoffman in 1973. Available on a video that can be downloaded from the internet
Undated

Garry Kasparov photo
William Hague photo
John Jay photo
Richard Holbrooke photo
Anatoliy Tymoshchuk photo
Nayef Al-Rodhan photo
Michael Hudson (economist) photo

“So the game plan is not merely to free the income of the wealthiest class to “offshore” itself into assets denominated in harder currencies abroad. It is to scrap the progressive tax system altogether. … How stable can a global situation be where the richest nation does not tax its population, but creates new public debt to hand out to its bankers? … The “solution” to the coming financial crisis in the United States may await the dollar’s plunge as an opportunity for a financial Tonkin Gulf resolution. Such a crisis would help catalyze the tax system’s radical change to a European-style “Steve Forbes” flat tax and VAT sales-excise tax…. More government giveaways will be made to the financial sector in a vain effort to keep bad debts afloat and banks “solvent.” As in Ireland and Latvia, public debt will replace private debt, leaving little remaining for Social Security or indeed for much social spending. … The bottom line is that after the prolonged tax giveaway exacerbates the federal budget deficit – along with the balance-of-payments deficit – we can expect the next Republican or Democratic administration to step in and “save” the country from economic emergency by scaling back Social Security while turning its funding over, Pinochet-style, to Wall Street money managers to loot as they did in Chile. And one can forget rebuilding America’s infrastructure. It is being sold off by debt-strapped cities and states to cover their budget shortfalls resulting from un-taxing real estate and from foreclosures. Welcome to debt peonage. This is worse than what was meant by a double-dip recession. It will be with us much longer.”

Michael Hudson (economist) (1939) American economist

Obama's Bushism http://michael-hudson.com/2010/12/obamas-bushism/ (December 8, 2010)
Michael-Hudson.com, 1998-

“In the Far West, the United States of America openly claimed to be custodians of the whole planet. Universally feared and envied, universally respected for their enterprise, yet for their complacency very widely despised, the Americans were rapidly changing the whole character of man’s existence. By this time every human being throughout the planet made use of American products, and there was no region where American capital did not support local labour. Moreover the American press, gramophone, radio, cinematograph and televisor ceaselessly drenched the planet with American thought. Year by year the aether reverberated with echoes of New York’s pleasures and the religious fervours of the Middle West. What wonder, then, that America, even while she was despised, irresistibly moulded the whole human race. This, perhaps, would not have mattered, had America been able to give of her very rare best. But inevitably only her worst could be propagated. Only the most vulgar traits of that potentially great people could get through into the minds of foreigners by means of these crude instruments. And so, by the floods of poison issuing from this people’s baser members, the whole world, and with it the nobler parts of America herself, were irrevocably corrupted.
For the best of America was too weak to withstand the worst. Americans had indeed contributed amply to human thought. They had helped to emancipate philosophy from ancient fetters. They had served science by lavish and rigorous research. In astronomy, favoured by their costly instruments and clear atmosphere, they had done much to reveal the dispositions of the stars and galaxies. In literature, though often they behaved as barbarians, they had also conceived new modes of expression, and moods of thought not easily appreciated in Europe. They had also created a new and brilliant architecture. And their genius for organization worked upon a scale that was scarcely conceivable, let alone practicable, to other peoples. In fact their best minds faced old problems of theory and of valuation with a fresh innocence and courage, so that fogs of superstition were cleared away wherever these choice Americans were present. But these best were after all a minority in a huge wilderness of opinionated self-deceivers, in whom, surprisingly, an outworn religious dogma was championed with the intolerant optimism of youth. For this was essentially a race of bright, but arrested, adolescents. Something lacked which should have enabled them to grow up. One who looks back across the aeons to this remote people can see their fate already woven of their circumstance and their disposition, and can appreciate the grim jest that these, who seemed to themselves gifted to rejuvenate the planet, should have plunged it, inevitably, through spiritual desolation into senility and age-long night.”

Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter II: Europe’s Downfall; Section 1, “Europe and America” (p. 33)

John F. Kennedy photo
William G. Boykin photo

“George Bush was not elected by a majority of the voters in the United States, he was appointed by God.”

William G. Boykin (1948) Recipient of the Purple Heart medal

Regarding President George W. Bush, "Culture War: The American Taliban" http://adultthought.ucsd.edu/Culture_War/The_American_Taliban.html,

George W. Bush photo
Sam Harris photo

“Unreason is now ascendant in the United States—in our schools, in our courts, and in each branch of the federal government. Only 28 percent of Americans believe in evolution; 68 percent believe in Satan. Ignorance in this degree, concentrated in both the head and belly of a lumbering superpower, is now a problem for the entire world.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

[Sam Harris, 2 August 2005, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harris/the-politics-of-ignorance_b_5053.html, "The Politics of Ignorance", The Huffington Post, 2006-10-16]
2000s

Harriet Harman photo

“Although it was a very close election, I don't think it was a polarised election. It was a tough fought contest but it was not a divisive contest. Although he won by a whisker I think the party will unite behind Ed Miliband.”

Harriet Harman (1950) British politician

On the Labour Leadership Election result http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/2010/09/27/new-leader-ed-miliband-vows-to-unite-labour-as-party-face-elections-to-decide-who-sits-in-shadow-cabinet-86908-22590365/, September 27, 2010.

Shankar Dayal Sharma photo

“The Rigveda stated that the earth was a …globe suspended freely in space. The Vedic texts disclosed that the Sun held the earth and heavenly bodies in its orbit. The Shatapatha Brahmana, a treatise of untold antiquity, recognized and explained the fact that the earth was spherical.. Aryabhata explained the daily rising and setting of planets and stars in terms of the earth’s constant revolutionary motion. The Surya Siddhantha said that the earth, owing to its gravitational force draw all things to itself. In physics, the thinker Kanada, explained light and heat as different aspects of the same element, thus anticipating Clarke Maxwell's Electro-magnetic Theory, which unified different forms of radiant energy. Sankaracharya, in his Advaita thought expanded the concept of unity of matter and energy. Vacaspati recognized light as composed of minute particles emitted by substances, anticipating Newton’s Corpuscular Theory of Light and the later discovery of the Photon. In Botany, Sankara Mishra and Kanada have discussed the circulation of sap in the Plant and the Santiparva of Mahabharata has clearly stated that the plants develop on the strength of nutrients made through interaction of sunlight and materials obtained from the air and ground. Bhaskarcharya's concept of Differential Calculus preceded Newton by many centuries. His study of time identified Truti: The 3400th part of a second as the unit of time.”

Shankar Dayal Sharma (1918–1999) Indian politician

He has rightly brought out the rationality and application of Sanskrit literature in diverse fields
Source: Aruna Goel Good Governance and Ancient Sanskrit Literature http://books.google.co.in/books?id=El_VADF13pUC&pg=PA16, Deep and Deep Publications, 1 January 2003, p. 16-17

Donald J. Trump photo

“Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it. I finished it. You know what I mean. President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period. Now we all want to get back to making America strong and great again.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

[Trump finally says Obama born in U.S., blames Clinton for controversy, USA Today, 16 September 2016, http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/2016/09/16/donald-trump-barack-obama-hillary-clinton-presidential-campaign-birtherism/90471868/]
Conspiracy theories about Barack Obama's citizenship were not started by Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign according to PolitiFact.com http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/sep/16/donald-trump/fact-checking-donald-trumps-claim-hillary-clinton-/, and Trump continued to question Obama's citizenship for years after he released his long-form birth certificate in 2011 http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/sep/16/donald-trump/donald-trumps-pants-fire-claim-he-finished-obama-b/.
2010s, 2016, September

Stephen Harper photo
Richard Holbrooke photo

“Our meeting with Admiral Leighton Smith, on the other hand, did not go well. He had been in charge of the NATO air strikes in August and September [1995], and this gave him enormous credibility, especially with the Bosnian Serbs. Smith was also the beneficiary of a skillful public relations effort that cast him as the savior of Bosnia. In a long profile, Newsweek had called him "a complex warrior and civilizer, a latter-day George C. Marshall." This was quite a journalistic stretch, given the fact that Smith considered the civilian aspects of the task beneath him and not his job - quite the opposite of what General Marshall stood for.
After a distinguished thirty-three-year Navy career, including almost three hundred combat missions in Vietnam, Smith was well qualified for his original post as commander of NATO's southern forces and Commander in Chief of all U. S. naval forces in Europe. But he was the wrong man for his additional assignment as IFOR commander, which was the result of two bureaucratic compromises, one with the French, the other with the American military. General Joulwan rightly wanted the sixty thousand IFOR soldiers to have as their commanding officer an Army general trained in the use of ground forces. But Paris insisted that if Joulwan named a separate Bosnia commander, it would have to be a Frenchman. This was politically impossible for the United States; thus, the Franh objections left only one way to preserve an American chain of command - to give the job to Admiral Smith, who joked that he was now known as "General" Smith. (…)
On the military goals of Dayton, he was fine; his plans for separating the forces along the line we had drawn in Dayton and protecting his forces were first-rate. But he was hostile to any suggestions that IFOR help implement any nonmilitary portion of the agreement. This, he said repeatedly, was not his job.
Based on Shalikashvili's statement at White House meetings, Christopher and I had assumed that the IFOR commander would use his authority to do substancially more than he was obligated to do. The meeting with Smith shattered that hope. Smith and his British deputy, General Michael Walker, made clear that they intended to take a minimalist approach to all aspects of implementation other than force protection. Smith signaled this in his first extensive public statement to the Bosnian people, during a live call-in program on Pale Television - an odd choice for his first local media appearance. During the program, he answered a question in a manner that dangerously narrowed his own authority. He later told Newsweek about it with a curious pride: "One of the questions I was asked was, "Admiral, is it true that IFOR is going to arrest Serbs in the Serb suburbs of Sarajevo?" I said, "Absolutely not, I don't have the authority to arrest anybody"."”

Richard Holbrooke (1941–2010) American diplomat

This was an inaccurate way to describe IFOR's mandate. It was true IFOR was not supposed to make routine arrests of ordinary citizens. But IFOR had the authority to arrest indicted war criminals, and could also detain anyone who posed a threat to its forces. Knowing what the question meant, Smith had sent an unfortunate signal of reassurance to Karadzic - over his own network.
Source: 1990s, To End a War (1998), p.327-329

George H. W. Bush photo
Lyndon B. Johnson photo
W. S. Gilbert photo
Christopher Hitchens photo
John F. Kennedy photo

“If all of you had voted the other way — there's about 5500 of you here tonight — I would not be the President of the United States.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

"Address in Chicago at a dinner of the Democratic Party of Cook County (155)," (28 April 1961) http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/Ready-Reference/JFK-Quotations.aspx
1961

Zora Neale Hurston photo
Stephen Harper photo

“The Reform party is very much a modern manifestation of the Republican movement in Western Canada; the U. S. Republicans started in the western United States.”

Stephen Harper (1959) 22nd Prime Minister of Canada

1990s, Speech to the Council for National Policy (1997)

Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery photo
Edward Carson, Baron Carson photo
Dallin H. Oaks photo

“None should resist the plea that we unite to increase our concern for the welfare and future of our children — the rising generation.”

Dallin H. Oaks (1932) Apostle of the LDs Church

Dallin H. Oaks http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865563944/Elder-Oaks-advocates-for-children-during-Saturday-afternoon-session.html?pg=all, Dallin H. Oaks Advocates for Children, Deseret News, 6 October 2012

Robert Kagan photo
Enoch Powell photo

“[ Chernobyl has strengthened the] growing impulse to escape from the nightmare of peace being dependent upon the contemplation of horrific and mutual carnage. Events have now so developed that this aspiration can at last be rationally, logically and – I dare to add – patriotically seized by the people of the United Kingdom if they will use their votes to do so.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech at the Royal Overseas League in London hinting that people should vote Labour, who had unilateral nuclear disarmament as their policy (7 June 1987), quoted in The Times (8 June 1987), p. 12 .
1980s

“He's got in, behind. Donovan, Donovan goes alone and scores! Oh, what a goal! Landon Donovan, tremendous strike for the United States! It looked impossible, but Donovan did it! And the USA are back in business!”

Ian Darke (1950) British association football and boxing commentator

2010s, 2010, 2010 FIFA World Cup
Context: Now, then. Landon Donovan for the United States. Twisting, turning. Can he find the right ball? Cesar hit it away; it's played back in by Bocanegra. Oh, and nearly Altidore getting under of it. A really good clearance by Jokić; just when it looked as if Jozy Altidore might be in. They really have to put Slovenia under pressure. If they can get one goal, I think, John. You just wonder, whether then Slovenia might start to look a little bit shaky and start to wonder. He's got in, behind. Donovan, Donovan goes alone and scores! Oh, what a goal! Landon Donovan, tremendous strike for the United States! It looked impossible, but Donovan did it! And the USA are back in business!

Slovenia v. United States http://www.listenonrepeat.com/watch/?v=9UV-E8YqjlI (18 June 2010).<!--https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WykkVg4aZ7w-->

George W. Bush photo

“And as a result of the United States military, Taliban no longer is in existence.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

Speech in Springfield, Ohio, September 27, 2004 http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2004/09/20040927-4.html
2000s, 2004

Amir Taheri photo
Sharron Angle photo

“President Obama repeated the grandiose nonsense that has tainted American foreign policy since World War II, the hubristic absurdity that the United States is the one indispensable nation in world affairs.”

R. Lee Wrights (1958–2017) American gubernatorial candidate

2012, " The State of the Union is Still a State of War http://www.libertyforall.net/?p=7189"

PZ Myers photo
Anu Partanen photo
Dwight D. Eisenhower photo

“I believe that the United States as a government, if it is going to be true to its own founding documents, does have the job of working toward that time when there is no discrimination made on such inconsequential reason as race, color, or religion.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)

Presidential news conference http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/all_about_ike/quotes.html (13 May 1959)
1950s

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi photo

“I want the standard of living in Iran in ten years' time to be exactly on a level with that in Europe today. In twenty years' time we shall be ahead of the United States.”

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919–1980) Shah of Iran

As quoted in Marvin Zonis (1991), Majestic Failure: The Fall of the Shah, page 65
Attributed

Ray Comfort photo
Ramachandra Guha photo
Joseph Alois Schumpeter photo
Henri Poincaré photo
Dada Vaswani photo

“Religion divides, creates discord, but spirituality unites.”

Dada Vaswani (1918–2018) Spiritual leader

Source: http://www.beliefnet.com/faiths/hinduism/2005/06/the-world-needs-love.aspx