“Neither the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt. He therefore is the truest friend to the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue, and who, so far as his power and influence extend, will not suffer a man to be chosen into any office of power and trust who is not a wise and virtuous man.” Samuel Adams
“The liberties of our Country, the freedom of our civil constitution are worth defending at all hazards: And it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have receiv’d them as a fair Inheritance from our worthy Ancestors: They purchas’d them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood; and transmitted them to us with care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us without a struggle; or be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men.” - Samuel Adams
“The Roman Republic fell, not because of the ambition of Caesar or
Augustus, but because it had already long ceased to be in any real
sense a republic at all. When the sturdy Roman plebeian, who lived by
his own labor, who voted without reward according to his own
convictions, and who with his fellows formed in war the terrible Roman
legion, had been changed into an idle creature who craved nothing in
life save the gratification of a thirst for vapid excitement, who was
fed by the state, and who directly or indirectly sold his vote to the
highest bidder, then the end of the republic was at hand, and nothing
could save it. The laws were the same as they had been, but the
people behind the laws had changed, and so the laws counted for
nothing.” —Teddy Roosevelt
“There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism.... A
hyphenated American is not an American at all... Americanism is a
matter of the spirit, and of the soul...The one absolutely certain way
of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its
continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a
tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of
German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans,
French-Americans...each preserving its separate nationality.... The
men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated
Americans.... There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a
good American.”
For an American citizen to vote as a German-American, an Irish-American,
or an English-American, is to be a traitor to American institutions; and
those hyphenated Americans who terrorize American politicians by threats
of the foreign vote are engaged in treason to the American republic.”
-Former President Theodore Roosevelt, speech before Knights of Columbus, 1915.
“America’s core culture has primarily been the culture of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century settlers who founded our nation. The central elements of that culture are the Christian religion; Protestant values, including individualism, the work ethic, and moralism; the English language; British traditions of law, justice, and limits on government power; and a legacy of European art, literature, and philosophy. Out of this culture the early settlers formulated the American Creed, with its principles of liberty, equality, human rights, representative government, and private property. Subsequent generations of immigrants were assimilated into the culture of the founding settlers and modified it, but did not change it fundamentally. It was, after all, Anglo-Protestant culture, values, institutions, and the opportunities they created that attracted more immigrants to America than to all the rest of the world.” —Samuel P. Huntington