Yankee Doodle Dandy

What is the essence of America? Finding and maintaining that perfect, delicate balance between freedom "to" and freedom "from." ~Marilyn vos Savant, in Parade


America is much more than a geographical fact. It is a political and moral fact - the first community in which men set out in principle to institutionalize freedom, responsible government, and human equality. ~Adlai Stevenson


If you are ashamed to stand by your colors, you had better seek another flag. ~Author Unknown


America is another name for opportunity. Our whole history appears like a last effort of divine providence on behalf of the human race. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Of all the supervised conditions for life offered man, those under USA's constitution have proved the best. Wherefore, be sure when you start modifying, corrupting or abrogating it. ~Martin H. Fischer


Some Americans need hyphens in their names, because only part of them has come over; but when the whole man has come over, heart and thought and all, the hyphen drops of its own weight out of his name. ~Woodrow Wilson


Our country is not the only thing to which we owe our allegiance. It is also owed to justice and to humanity. Patriotism consists not in waving the flag, but in striving that our country shall be righteous as well as strong. ~James Bryce


Our great modern Republic. May those who seek the blessings of its institutions and the protection of its flag remember the obligations they impose. ~Ulysses S. Grant


Those who won our independence believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty. ~Louis D. Brandeis


Men love their country, not because it is great, but because it is their own. ~Seneca


A real patriot is the fellow who gets a parking ticket and rejoices that the system works. ~Bill Vaughan


Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may. ~Mark Twain


He is a poor patriot whose patriotism does not enable him to understand how all men everywhere feel about their altars and their hearthstones, their flag and their fatherland. ~Harry Emerson Fosdick


We have enjoyed so much freedom for so long that we are perhaps in danger of forgetting how much blood it cost to establish the Bill of Rights. ~Felix Frankfurter


The American Revolution was a beginning, not a consummation. ~Woodrow Wilson



Side note to my cousin who is, at this moment, enjoying the fact that I squirm under the still astounding and somewhat uncalled for realization that I have Republican leanings in my liberal world: John Adams - not only, arguably, one of the greatest American Presidents but perhaps even one of the greatest Americans - was a Unitarian. Squirm back, little girl.

Teach Your Children Well

Peter, Peter Pumpkin Eater
Had a wife and couldn't keep her
Put her in a pumpkin shell
and there he kept her very well.


Certainly I can't be the only one who thinks this guy is a little less Paul James and a lot more Sweeney Todd? Come on, people, it's all there for us to get. This guy didn't grow a fourteen foot diameter pumpkin. His wife obviously left (or tried to leave) him, the "Pumpkin Eater" baked her into a pumpkin pie and kept her there VERY WELL.

What kind of violence are we teaching our children nowadays?