“It took bold and noble men and women of wisdom and grit to mould America!”
“You can’t spell American without “I can.”
“No wonder I’d never had any friends. I was shockingly bad at it.”
“Great. Now the queen thought I was a misfit, too.”
“Listen to me, kitten. Win or lose, you’ll always be a princess to me.”
“It s the most threatening disease of all. It s called other people”
“America is the spirit of human exploration distilled.”
“America is not always the country it means to be.”
“You get confused by crying women, I get confused by walks with princes.”
“Your Majesty— Tugging my ear. Whenever.”
“Antitrust has become a legal backwater in recent decades. But the curse of bigness is back, and antitrust enforcement must come back with it, updated to perform its original, republican function: protecting the independence of the American people from oligarchic control.”
“Benjamin Franklin, one of the most revered intellectuals of his day, was instrumental in importing Enlightenment thinking to the British colonies in North America. There, Enlightenment scientists understanding of race served a critical political function: the view that nature had created racial distinctions resolved the contradiction between the Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality, and tolerance and the enslavement of African people. The shift to secular thinking reinforced the view that Black people were innately and immutably inferior as a race and therefore were subject to permanent enslavement. After chattel slavery ended, the biological concept of race continued to shape the social and biological sciences, medical practice, and social policies, forming a scientific foundation for eugenics, Jim Crow, and post-civil rights color-blind ideology that ignores racism s persistent impact.”
“I regard President Trump as “America’s Terrorist’.”
“My parents spoke as though Amrika, with her fair-haired men and her torch, would cast a spell and transform us all into charmed, unrecognizable creatures.”
“Every effort to extend equality into the heart of American citizenship, to erase the race line drawn by Chief Justice Taney, and to enlarge the we who belong to the American project continues the work of overturning Dred Scott. Also implicated is the extent to which these questions can be left to democratic majorities or even empowered pluralities. Indeed, the doctrine of popular sovereignty would have left these questions to a vote. But true equality cannot be left to the whims of an electorate--it is the predicate for democracy and the vote, not their product. This, too, is a lesson from the period of the late 1850s: that a constitution or declaration constitutes the we, and that this act of constituting structures all other distributive decisions and identity itself. Thus, who we are, and who belongs, is the most fundamental question that we have ever asked or can ever ask. We are still struggling to get the answer to this question right. We are still coming up short.”
“During this period, [Frederick] Douglass became more than just an orator or a journalist: he became a prophet of a United States who embodied the courage of its convictions, a country that, as Douglass put it, shall not brand the Declaration of Independence as a lie. At the time, it was horror to the white South and a foolish dream to much of the white North. Today Douglass s vision of America is so pervasive that even its strongest opponents pretend to believe in it: an America that actually recognizes that all are created equal, where the rights of citizenship are not abridged on the basis of accidents of birth.”
“If we re to live up to our own time, then victory won t lie in the blade. But in all the bridges we ve made, that is the promise to glade, the hill we climb. If only we dare. It s because being American is more than a pride we inherit, it s the past we step into and how we repair it.”