One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.
But this is the great danger America faces. That we will cease to be one nation and become instead a collection of interest groups: city against suburb, region against region, individual against individual. Each seeking to satisfy private wants.
The essence of America - that which really unites us - is not ethnicity, or nationality or religion - it is an idea - and what an idea it is: That you can come from humble circumstances and do great things.
The great power the president has is that he is the most prominent person in the biggest media event on the planet. He has the attention of the nation and the world. When he speaks, everybody listens.
Spiritually, we have marginalized the Bible. We've trivialized marriage, and we've neutralized the church. America today is in great turmoil. It feels like the soul of our nation has been taken from us.
I am concerned for the security of our great Nation; not so much because of any threat from without, but because of the insidious forces working from within.
More than 26,000 lives may be lost to the effects of drug abuse this year. This tragic impact is felt in communities across this great nation. Sadly many of these deaths occur among our young people.
Many years before I had left a beautiful country and a rich nation and I returned to that country six years later to find it fundamentally changed and in a state of upheaval, and in great spiritual and material need.
Wayne Downing is also a great leader, has served our nation very well, and I think it's great that he's coming back to join a very capable administration already of dealing with this problem, and it will just strengthen that team.
When Gordon the Brown, in London in 1997, commissioned a great inquisition or survey of his new realm, the result was the so-called national asset register, which was immediately dubbed by the boomers of the UK Treasury 'the modern Domesday Book.'
I was one of the actors in 'Braveheart,' and that had a huge impact on the political scene in Scotland. One of the results of that, in 2014 there's going to be a referendum in Scotland as to whether Scotland is going to be independent. A great deal o...
You think history is going to remember the United States as a great democracy? No, they're going to think of us as a nation that became addicted to war. They'll call us warlords.
But through world wars and a Great Depression, through painful social upheaval and a Cold War, and now through the attacks of September 11, 2001, our Nation has indeed survived.
In fact, it seems to me that making strategic alliances across national borders in order to treat HIV among the world's poor is one of the last great hopes of solidarity across a widening divide.
Americans understand that one of our great national strengths is innovation. Great innovators - Benjamin Franklin, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and others - are household names.
We are seeing a great awakening. A national movement of We the People, brought together by what unites us - a shared love of liberty, and an understanding of the unlimited potential of free men and free women.
Places like the National Theatre or Sheffield, these great engines of theatre, make us cutting edge because they can be experimental. They can do plays that nobody else can afford to do in ways nobody else can afford to do.
I love De la Renta. I love CoSTUME National; I think they're just incredible. And I love Marc Jacobs, too - they're also great, just a great brand.
What this country needs what every country needs occasionally is a good hard bloody war to revive the vice of patriotism on which its existence as a nation depends.
My colleagues, while it is good that the Nation is finally focused on the critical issue of securing our ports, our rhetoric and our passion about Dubai must be matched by the funding necessary to keep our ports and our citizens safe.
I am not saying that I'm happy about what's going on right now in our nation, but I am at peace and I am comforted because I know that He's on the throne. That is good enough for me.
