"And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way."
— John Steinbeck

"We do not need to get good laws to restrain bad people. We need to get good people to restrain us from bad laws."
— G.K. Chesterton

" — This world is full of trouble, umfundisi.
— Who knows it better?
— Yet you believe?
Kumalo looked at him under the light of the lamp. I believe, he said, but I have learned that it is a secret. Pain and suffering, they are a secret. Kindness and love, they are a secret. But I have learned that kindness and love can pay for pain and suffering. There is my wife, and you, my friend, and these people who welcomed me, and the child who is so eager to be with us here in Ndotsheni – so in my suffering I can believe.
— I have never thought that a Christian would be free of suffering, umfundisi. For our Lord suffered. And I come to believe that he suffered, not to save us from suffering, but to teach us how to bear suffering. For he knew that there is no life without suffering.
Kumalo looked at his friend with joy. You are a preacher, he said."
— Alan Paton (Cry, the Beloved Country)

"If I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, 'Kurt is up in heaven now.' That's my favorite joke."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Our obligations to our country never cease but with our lives. - John Adams"
— David McCullough (John Adams)

"A little bit of chicken fry, a cold beer on a friday night, a pair of jeans that fit just right, and the radio upp."
— Zac Brown Band

""the fact that they stole their whole shtick from Woody Guthrie and the coal-mining bards. While the alternative nation meows about personal fashion angst, the Appalachian nation still sings about unemployment.""
— Jim Goad (The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks, and White Trash Became America's Scapegoats)

"On my honor, I will do my best
To do my duty To God and my country"
— Boy Scouts of America

"What you see is kinda what you get with me. I'm a very real person, or I hope to be, anyway. I don't have nothing to hide"
— Kenny Chesney

"The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil."
— Sarah Palin

"Yeah I'm a country boy, but I'm a player too."
— Bubba Sparxxx

""The soldier is the Army. No army is better than its soldiers. The Soldier is also a citizen. In fact, the highest obligation and privilege of citizenship is that of bearing arms for one’s country"
"
— George S. Patton Jr.

"Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use othyer people's in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack."
— Flannery O'Connor

"America is a leap of the imagination. From its beginning, people had only a persistent idea of what a good country should be. The idea involved freedom, equality, justice, and the pursuit of happiness; nowadays most of us probably could not describe it a lot more clearly than that. The truth is, it always has been a bit of a guess. No one has ever known for sure whether a country based on such an idea is really possible, but again and again, we have leaped toward the idea and hoped. What SuAnne Big Crow demonstrated in the Lead high school gym is that making the leap is the whole point. The idea does not truly live unless it is expressed by an act; the country does not live unless we make the leap from our tribe or focus group or gated community or demographic, and land on the shaky platform of that idea of a good country which all kinds of different people share.

This leap is made in public, and it's made for free. It's not a product or a service that anyone will pay you for. You do it for reasons unexplainable by economics--for ambition, out of conviction, for the heck of it, in playfulness, for love. It's done in public spaces, face-to-face, where anyone is free to go. It's not done on television, on the Internet, or over the telephone; our electronic systems can only tell us if the leap made elsewhere has succeeded or failed. The places you'll see it are high school gyms, city sidewalks, the subway, bus stations, public parks, parking lots, and wherever people gather during natural disasters. In those places and others like them, the leaps that continue to invent and knit the country continue to be made. When the leap fails, it looks like the L.A. riots, or Sherman's March through Georgia. When it succeeds, it looks like the New York City Bicentennial Celebration in July 1976 or the Civil Rights March on Washington in 1963. On that scale, whether it succeeds or fails, it's always something to see. The leap requires physical presence and physical risk. But the payoff--in terms of dreams realized, of understanding, of people getting along--can be so glorious as to make the risk seem minuscule."
— Ian Frazier (On the Rez)

"I care dearly for this country [USA]. I do love this country. I spend enough time overseas to realize that as bad as it is it's still probably about the best thing going. What kills me though is when I know it can be better."
— Blackie Lawless

"you might be a readneck "
— Melissa Ball

"And he gave it for his opinion, 'that whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.'"
— Jonathan Swift (Gulliver's Travels)

"In the city a funeral is just an interruption of traffic; in the country it is a form of entertainment. "
— George Ade

""A bright man of conviction and action is a beacon to his country,
but a flash light to the scurrying of inaction, ego, and insecurity of lesser men."
"
— Daniel S. Green (The Perfect Pitch: The Biography of Roger Owens, the Famous Peanut Man at Dodger Stadium)

"Whenever I meet someone (from western countries) whom I don't know, he/she always asks "Do you play outdoor games?" Well! Ofcourse! Once I played billiards in open roof free air cafe. :D"
— Amanullah Ashraf

""...It is a proud privilege to be a soldier – a good soldier … [with] discipline, self-respect, pride in his unit and his country, a high sense of duty and obligation to comrades and to his superiors, and a self confidence born of demonstrated ability.""
— George S. Patton Jr.

"I would rather have bowel surgery in the woods with a stick.
If you are not stung or pronged to death in some unexpected manner, you may be fatally chomped by sharks or crocodiles, or carried helplessly out to sea by irresistible currents, or left to stagger to an unhappy death in the baking outback
"
— Bill Bryson (In a Sunburned Country)

"Nevertheless, I drove right past my landmark, an antique store which looked to me like an ordinary house with junk piled on the front porch.""
— Abraham Verghese

"Me and the bottle have always been friends, we've had a few old nasty fights but the bottle would always win, so when I go to answer that final curtain call, I can hear these words being whispered by all... Ol' George stopped drinking today."
— George Jones

"You've got to bend when the wind blows"
— JoDee Messina

""Christmas is the season when most folks kill themselves/Christmas is the reason for all these stupid bells""
— the Handsome Family