
— George W. Bush 43rd President of the United States 1946
radio address https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2008/11/20081101.html (1 November 2008)
2000s, 2008
Nobel lecture (2001)
Kontext: The United Nations, whose membership comprises almost all the States in the world, is founded on the principle of the equal worth of every human being. It is the nearest thing we have to a representative institution that can address the interests of all states, and all peoples. Through this universal, indispensable instrument of human progress, States can serve the interests of their citizens by recognizing common interests and pursuing them in unity.
— George W. Bush 43rd President of the United States 1946
radio address https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2008/11/20081101.html (1 November 2008)
2000s, 2008
— Charles Manson American criminal and musician 1934 - 2017
Interview with KALX radio at Vacaville http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G179-qOvCE8
Kontext: A lot of you young people, even though you go through college, you still don’t understand that courtroom. That courtroom is the court of the kings and lords of the world. We as human beings can invoke the ground here called the United States of America. And the reason our system has perpetuated in such a way is because all the powers of Europe and England and monarchies and all those big people; we have come over here and started another world where each man in the United States has that power because he has that courtroom. That courtroom belongs to every human being in the United States. And if you take that courtroom away from one human being, you’re taking that courtroom away from all human beings. Then what follows is you got kings and queens of yesterday – they’re gonna come and play croquet with your heads. They’re gonna take your courtrooms. They’re gonna take your money and they’re gonna take your country. They’re gonna take your resources. They’re gonna rip you off in every way you can think of because you didn’t give your own children the benefit of the courtroom that your fathers fought in battles and died for.
— George Washington first President of the United States 1732 - 1799
Attributed to Washington in "Farewell to the United States of Europe: long live the EU!" by André Fontaine at Open Democracy (29 November 2001) http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-europefuture/article_344.jsp. It appears to have originally circulated in French:
:: Je suis citoyen de la Grande République de l'Humanité. Je vois le genre humain uni comme une grande famille par des liens fraternels. Nous avons jeté une semence de liberté et d'union qui germera peu à peu dans toute la Terre. Un jour, sur le modèle des Etats-Unis d'Amérique, se constitueront les États-Unis d'Europe. Les États-Unis seront le législateur de toutes les nationalités.
: An anonymous blogger in "Did George Washington predict a "United States of Europe"? (30 January 2010) http://racehist.blogspot.com/2010/01/did-george-washington-predict-united.html showed that it derived from Gustave Rodrigues, Le peuple de l'action: essai sur l'idéalisme américain (A. Colin, 1917), p. 207:
:: Washington écrivait à La Fayette qu'il se condérait comme « citoyen de la grande république de l'humanité » et ajoutait : « Je vois le genre humain uni comme une grande famille par des liens fraternels ». Ailleurs il écrivait, prophétiquement: « Nous avons jeté une semence de liberté et d'union qui germera peu à peu dans toute la terre. Un jour, sur le modèle des Etats-Unis d'Amérique, se constitueront les États-Unis d'Europe. »
: A translation by Louise Seymour Houghton ( The People of Action: An Essay on American Idealism (1918) http://books.google.com/books?id=b8Y9AAAAYAAJ) reads:
:: Washington wrote to Lafayette that he considered himself a "citizen of the great republic of humanity," adding: "I see the human race a great family, united by fraternal bonds." Elsewhere he wrote prophetically: "We have sown a seed of liberty and union that will gradually germinate throughout the earth. Some day, on the model of the United States of America, will be constituted the United States of Europe." [pp. 209-210]
: The first two quotations come from a letter to the Marquis de Lafayette of 15 August 1786 (see above) as quoted in Joseph Fabre's Washington, libérateur de l'Amérique: suivi de Washington et la revolution Américaine (Ch. Delagrave, 1886), and the third is also found in that source where, although placed between quotation marks, it is clearly intended as the author's own comments on what "Washington and his friends" were saying to the world by establishing the American Constitution. Gustave Rodrigues mistakenly printed Fabre's words as Washington's alongside some actual observations of his from a letter to Lafayette, and so created the misquotation.
Misattributed
— George William Curtis American writer 1824 - 1892
1850s, The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question (1859)
— Muhammad Ali Jinnah Founder and 1st Governor General of Pakistan 1876 - 1948
Address to the Constituent Assembly (1947)
Kontext: You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place or worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed — that has nothing to do with the business of the State. As you know, history shows that in England, conditions, some time ago, were much worse than those prevailing in India today. The Roman Catholics and the Protestants persecuted each other. Even now there are some States in existence where there are discriminations made and bars imposed against a particular class. Thank God, we are not starting in those days. We are starting in the days where there is no discrimination, no distinction between one community and another, no discrimination between one caste or creed and another. We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one State.
— John F. Kennedy 35th president of the United States of America 1917 - 1963
Radio and television report to the American people on civil rights (11 June 1963)]
1963, Civil Rights Address
— Barack Obama 44th President of the United States of America 1961
Watchtower ONLINE LIBRARY http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/102011166?q=barack+obama&p=par Statement made by U.S. President Barack Obama at a joint press conference with Prime Minister David Cameron of the United Kingdom in July 2010
2010
„We of the United States need above all things to remember that“
— Theodore Roosevelt American politician, 26th president of the United States 1858 - 1919
1910s, Address to the Knights of Columbus (1915)
Kontext: Four centuries and a quarter have gone by since Columbus by discovering America opened the greatest era in world history. Four centuries have passed since the Spaniards began that colonization on the main land which has resulted in the growth of the nations of Latin-America. Three centuries have passed since, with the settlements on the coasts of Virginia and Massachusetts, the real history of what is now the United States began. All this we ultimately owe to the action of an Italian seaman in the service of a Spanish King and a Spanish Queen. It is eminently fitting that one of the largest and most influential social organizations of this great republic, a republic in which the tongue is English, and the blood derived from many sources, should, in its name, commemorate the great Italian. It is eminently fitting to make an address on Americanism before this society. We of the United States need above all things to remember that, while we are by blood and culture kin to each of the nations of Europe, we are also separate from each of them. We are a new and distinct nationality. We are developing our own distinctive culture and civilization, and the worth of this civilization will largely depend upon our determination to keep it distinctively our own. Our sons and daughters should be educated here and not abroad. We should freely take from every other nation whatever we can make of use, but we should adopt and develop to our own peculiar needs what we thus take, and never be content merely to copy.
— Fidel Castro former First Secretary of the Communist Party and President of Cuba 1926 - 2016
The Second Declaration of Havana (1962)
— Glenn Greenwald American journalist, lawyer and writer 1967
interview with Democracy Now! (November 14, 2012). Glenn Greenwald: While Petraeus Had Affair with Biographer, Corporate Media Had Affair with Petraeus. http://www.democracynow.org/2012/11/14/glenn_greenwald_while_petraeus_had_affair Retrieved on 2012-11-15.
— Otto Ohlendorf German general 1907 - 1951
To Leon Goldensohn, March 1, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004.
— Ronald Reagan American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989) 1911 - 2004
— Ulysses S. Grant 18th President of the United States 1822 - 1885
1860s, First State of the Union Address (1869)
Kontext: As the United States is the freest of all nations, so, too, its people sympathize with all people struggling for liberty and self-government; but while so sympathizing it is due to our honor that we should abstain from enforcing our views upon unwilling nations and from taking an interested part, without invitation, in the quarrels between different nations or between governments and their subjects. Our course should always be in conformity with strict justice and law, international and local.
— John McCain politician from the United States 1936 - 2018
On how he would have acted when Katrina made landfall if he had been president, LA Times http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-mccain25apr25,1,7654195.story, despite being in Arizona with Pres. Bush during Katrina's landfall http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24352103/; 25 April 2008
2000s, 2008
— Ernesto Che Guevara Argentine Marxist revolutionary 1928 - 1967
As quoted in Che Guevara Speaks: Selected Speeches and Writings (1968), by George Lavan, p. 17