American Quotes

Outside of the Constitution we have no legal authority more than private citizens, and within it we have only so much as that instrument gives us. This broad principle limits all our functions and applies to all subjects.

Legislation can neither be wise nor just which seeks the welfare of a single interest at the expense and to the injury of many and varied interests.

Honest conviction is my courage; the Constitution is my guide.

The goal to strive for is a poor government but a rich people.

It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word.

Right now the music is more of a hobby since I'm making a good living as an actress.

My mom taught me to go after my dreams. I have this faith in myself that I must have gotten from her.

I just kind of change, constantly, what my focus is. So whatever is stimulating me or inspiring me at the time is what I focus on.

I can't imagine actually singing on this show like I did on 'Felicity,' but it would be kind of funny.

I believe I can do anything. If I decide I want to be a doctor tomorrow, I'm going to be a doctor.

Very rarely do you have a perfect race, and it's about overcoming your mistakes in the race and remaining composed.

The thing about getting older is the injuries. You just get injured more often. You take time off, you come back, you get injured again and you never get in shape.

The earth is the Lord's. Psalm 24 basically says the earth is God's property. We have been given the privilege and responsibility of living on earth to see it isn't ruined.

I figure if I have one false start every ten or 12 years that I've been running, I probably won't false start again during my career.

His unit is in charge of 5,000 homes, and they've only been able to search about 2 percent of them. People are standing on roofs or sticking their hands out of air vents so they can get rescued.

At noon, on the Fourth of July, 1826, while the Liberty Bell was again sounding its old message to the people of Philadelphia, the soul of Thomas Jefferson passed on; and a few hours later John Adams entered into rest, with the name of his old friend upon his lips.

I am as hungry now as I was when I began in the sport. If anything, I am probably a bit hungrier. It is because I know there are fewer tomorrows than yesterdays.

The reader feels as if he is in Chongjin, where starving people ate the bark off trees; or atop Mount Taesong with the elite of Pyongyang, whose existence is a mix of sadism and whimsy; or with the masses who are bombarded day and night with the propaganda of North Korea's alternate reality.

The death of dictator Kim Jong-Il has cast all eyes on North Korea, a country without literature or freedom or truth.

It's true. In America, you can reinvent yourself at any turn. And, you know, if things aren't going well for you in life, everyone says, change, become someone different.

In America, the stories we tell ourselves and we tell each other in fiction have to do with individualism. Every person here is the center of his or her own story. And our job as people and as characters is to find our own motivations and desires, to overcome conflicts and obstacles toward defining

Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years. Imagine a place where not a single person has read a book that is truly about the character at its center.

I'd known that the visit would be highly scripted and that genuine interactions with citizens wouldn't be possible, since it's illegal for them to speak with foreigners. Still, I'd thought I'd had a unique look at North Korea, only to discover I was wrong.

I thought that, with so much current attention focused on the topic of North Korea, I might share what I think are three books which cast a rare light on the elusive realm of North Korea.

I know it really sounds cheesy, but I did feel a duty to try to tell the stories of people who couldn't speak for themselves.

For an entire populace, change, growth, and spontaneity were dangerous. Acting upon a personal desire, whispering a hidden longing, revealing your true feelings - all the human actions we think of as essential to a character - had be censored by the self lest they be punished by the state.

But, in North Korea, it's just the opposite. There's one story. It's written by the Kim regime. And 23 million people are conscripted to be secondary characters. There, as a youth, your aptitude towards certain jobs is measured, and the rest of your life is dictated, whether you'll be a fisherman or

With a foreign policy appropriately rooted in some sense of humanitarian decency, the Central African crisis will not be easily ignored by American policymakers. It screams for remedy.

To be sure, debates will linger about whether Medicare is too large or too small. Debates remain about the allocation of Medicare dollars. But December 8, 2003, demonstrated that there is no debate about this most fundamental fact: Medicare must survive.

Seventy years ago this November, Vladimir Lenin created the modern totalitarian state, transforming simpler forms of tyranny into history's most sophisticated apparatus of rule by terror.