This America Quotes

“There have always been those who argued that the end justifies the means, that the means aren’t really important,” [King] said. “But we will never have peace in the world until men everywhere recognize the ends are not cut off from the means, because the means represent the ideal in the making, and the end in the process, and ultimately you can’t reach good ends through evil means, because the means represent the seed and the end represents the tree.”
― Jill Lepore, This America: The Case for the Nation

“The great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right,” as Martin Luther King Jr. once said. The nation is often wrong. But so long as protest is possible, it can always be righted.”
― Jill Lepore, This America: The Case for the Nation

“A nation founded on the idea that all men are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights and offering asylum to anyone suffering from persecution is a beacon to the world. This is America at its best: a nation that welcomes dissent, protects free speech, nurtures invention, and makes possible almost unbelievable growth and prosperity.”
― Jill Lepore, This America: The Case for the Nation

“appalled by nationalism, they disavowed national history, as nationalism’s handmaiden. But when scholars stopped writing national history, other, less scrupulous people stepped in. Nations, to make sense of themselves, need some kind of agreed-upon past. They can get it from scholars or they can get it from demagogues, but get it they will. The endurance of nationalism proves that there’s never any shortage of fiends and frauds willing to prop up people’s sense of themselves and their destiny with a tissue of myths and prophecies, prejudices and hatreds, or to pour out the contents of old rubbish bags full of festering incitements, resentments, and calls to violence. When serious historians abandon the study of the nation, when scholars stop trying to write a common history for a people, nationalism doesn’t die. Instead, it eats liberalism. Liberalism is still in there. The trick is getting it out. There’s only one way to do that. It requires grabbing and holding onto a very good idea: that all people are equal and endowed from birth with inalienable rights and entitled to equal treatment, guaranteed by a nation of laws. This requires making the case for the nation.”
― Jill Lepore, This America: The Case for the Nation

“In a newly conservative country, immigration now stood at the center of American politics. By the 1990s, the debate over immigration had grown as intense as the one that had raged in the 1910s and 1920s. The undocumented Mexican immigrant population of the United States rose from about one million in 1988 to more than six and a half million in 2008. The U.S.-Mexico border became more militarized, and more dangerous, with Operation Blockade in Texas in 1993 and Operation Gatekeeper in California in 1994. In 1997, the chair of a congressional Commission on Immigration Reform said that immigration “is about who and what we are as a Nation,” a common refrain. Few had answers. But immigration became, increasingly, the issue on which American politics turned. Between 2005 and 2013, at least one person a day on average died trying to cross into the United States from Mexico.”
― Jill Lepore, This America: The Case for the Nation

“Right wrongs no man.”
― Jill Lepore, This America: The Case for the Nation

“To love this particular nation is to love the world. This paradox lies within all forms of liberal nationalism. A liberal nation is a nation to which anyone who affirms its civic ideals belongs.”
― Jill Lepore, This America: The Case for the Nation

“Liberalism is still in there. The trick is getting it out. There’s only one way to do that. It requires grabbing and holding onto a very good idea: that all people are equal and endowed from birth with inalienable rights and entitled to equal treatment, guaranteed by a nation of laws. This requires making the case for the nation.”
― Jill Lepore, This America: The Case for the Nation

“Nations reel and stagger on their way; they
make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful
wrongs; they do great and beautiful things.
And shall we not best guide humanity by
telling the truth about all this, so far as the
truth is ascertainable? —W. E. B. DuBois,
“The Propaganda of History,” 1935”
― Jill Lepore, This America: The Case for the Nation

“Liberalism is the belief that people are good and should be free, and that people erect governments in order to guarantee that freedom.”
― Jill Lepore, This America: The Case for the Nation