"We Americans... bear the ark of liberties of the world."
Mark Twain
Delivered: May 5, 2021
"We seek the right to play our part in advancing the cause of national defense and national unity. But certainly, there can be no true national unity where one-tenth of the population is denied their basic rights as American citizens."
A. Philip Randolph
Delivered: May 11, 2021
"Most Americans are fiscally conservative and socially liberal. I'm advocating a balanced budget. But along with that, look, there should be gay marriage equality. A woman should have the right to choose. Let's not build a fence across the border."
Gary Johnson
Delivered: May 6, 2021
"The Constitution preserves the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation where the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms."
James Madison
Delivered: May 3, 2021
"The history of my state of Oklahoma offers a great example of pursuing the American Dream. It was built and settled by pioneers moving West to seek better lives."
Mary Fallin
Delivered: May 12, 2021
"Americans deserve a better tomorrow, today."
Nancy Pelosi
Delivered: May 15, 2021
"Considering that Americans are now moving away from whiskey, moving away from brown spirits in general, I believe that they will all join Russians who drink vodka straight. They will sip it like cognac."
Roustam Tariko
Delivered: May 9, 2021
"If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land."
Henry James
Delivered: May 10, 2021
"Automation has emerged as a bigger threat to American jobs than globalization or immigration combined."
Oren Etzioni
Delivered: May 13, 2021
"If the American people don't love me, their descendants will."
Lyndon B. Johnson
Delivered: May 8, 2021
"Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality."
James Baldwin
Delivered: May 14, 2021
"According to the U.N., more than 2.7 billion people will face severe water shortages by 2025. Many social scientists predict that the next big wars will be over water. Nevertheless, the average American family blissfully consumes 300 gallons a day, when you add in watering the lawn and washing dishes, clothes, and cars."
Alex Shoumatoff
Delivered: May 2, 2021
"Jazz music, as is also the case with the old down-home spirituals, gospel and jubilee songs, jumps, shouts and moans, is essentially an American vernacular or idiomatic modification of musical conventions imported from Europe, beginning back during the time of the early settlers of the original colonies."
Albert Murray
Delivered: May 4, 2021
"Would the Protestant Reformation have happened without the printing press? Would the American Revolution have happened without pamphlets? Probably not. But neither printing presses nor pamphlets were the heroes of reform and revolution."
Rebecca MacKinnon
Delivered: May 7, 2021
"I grew up in the 1960s in Memphis, and my father was a member of the American Civil Liberties Union. I was born three years before Martin Luther King was killed, and I think that history of civil action was something that I had in my blood."
Ira Sachs
Delivered: May 17, 2021
"I can think of nothing more boring for the American people than to have to sit in their living rooms for a whole half hour looking at my face on their television screens."
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Delivered: May 26, 2021
"When 'American Pie' happened, I was so lucky to get that opportunity and I just tried to do a good job in that genre. But the films that inspired me as a kid were, like, Malcolm McDowall in 'A Clockwork Orange.' He was my hero."
Seann William Scott
Delivered: May 16, 2021
"The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness."
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Delivered: May 22, 2021
"An American cannot converse, but he can discuss, and his talk falls into a dissertation. He speaks to you as if he was addressing a meeting; and if he should chance to become warm in the discussion, he will say 'Gentlemen' to the person with whom he is conversing."
Alexis de Tocqueville
Delivered: May 24, 2021
"I no longer identify myself as Japanese or American but a 'citizen of the universe.'"
Ruth Asawa
Delivered: May 31, 2021
"Those who want to perpetuate apartheid also seek to divert your attention to the false issue of communism, to send the entire American public on a witch hunt."
Oliver Tambo
Delivered: May 28, 2021
"When I did 'Bird,' it was a surprise to some people, first because I wasn't in it and second because most of the films I'd been doing were cop movies or westerns or adventure films, so to be doing one about Charlie Parker, who was a great influence on American music, was a great thrill for me."
Clint Eastwood
Delivered: May 25, 2021
"Evangelical Christian politicians who cheat often raise questions about hypocrisy, especially if they preached piety in public and disregarded it in private. When Jewish politicians fall, they shatter different expectations, particularly that American Jews need to work together to preserve respectability and fireproof against anti-Semitism."
Jodi Kantor
Delivered: May 19, 2021
"I think a lot of the American people feel more than a little disappointed that the high-water mark for human exploration was 1969. The dream of human space travel has almost died for a lot of people."
Elon Musk
Delivered: May 29, 2021
"The American women are very pretty and have great simplicity of character, and the extreme neatness of their appearance is truly delightful: cleanliness is everywhere even more studiously attended to here than in England."
Marquis de Lafayette
Delivered: May 27, 2021
"For some people, the definition of who is and who isn't an American defies logic, historical accuracy, common sense, decency, good manners, the milk of human kindness, enjoyment in the good things in life, and love of good food."
W. Kamau Bell
Delivered: May 18, 2021
"I have a message for Democrats, including Joe Biden: the time of demeaning and destroying conservative Americans simply for their beliefs has come to an end."
Marjorie Taylor Greene
Delivered: May 23, 2021
"Know thyself. Remain steadfast. Follow your dreams. These are great directives and perfectly fitting for graduates. But reality is that achieving dreams takes a solid education - education that remains elusive for too many Americans."
Dorothy Bush Koch
Delivered: May 20, 2021
"In the heart of the Great Depression, millions of American workers did something they'd never done before: they joined a union. Emboldened by the passage of the Wagner Act, which made collective bargaining easier, unions organized industries across the country, remaking the economy."
James Surowiecki
Delivered: May 21, 2021
"We Americans think, in every country in transition, there's a Thomas Jefferson hiding behind some rock or a James Madison beyond one sand dune."
Joe Biden
Delivered: June 1, 2021
"Nashville is wicked. It's like a proper music community, but it's also quintessentially American. You bump into people there with cowboy hats that spit in jars and call you 'boy.' I just love that."
Ed Sheeran
Delivered: May 30, 2021