Mamacita says:  No matter what the weather might be where you live, today is the Glorious Fourth.  It’s not the weather that makes it glorious.

1.  America, thou half-brother of the world, with something good and bad of every land.  –Philip James Bailey

2. America is the country where you can buy a lifetime supply of aspirin for one dollar and use it up in two weeks.  –John Barrymore

3.  The real democratic American idea is, not that every man shall be on a level with every other man, but that every man shall have liberty to be what God made him, without hindrance.  –Henry Ward Beecher

4.  Of all the nations in the world, the United States was built in nobody’s image.  It was the land of the unexpected, or unbounded hope, of ideals, of quests for an unknown perfection.  –Daniel J. Boorstin

5.  I would rather have a nod from an American than a snuffbox from an emperor.  –Lord Byron

6.  Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels – men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine.  As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.  –Dwight D. Eisenhower

7.  If we Americans are to survive it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to be first of all Americans; to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green.  If we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive, and probably won’t.  –William Faulkner

8.  The genius of the American system is that we have created extraordinary results from plain old ordinary people. –Phil Gramm

9.  Ours is the only country deliberately founded on a good idea.  –John Gunther

10.  For this is what America is all about.  It is the uncrossed desert and the unclimbed ridge.  It is the star that is not reached and the harvest that is sleeping in the unplowed ground.  –Lyndon B. Johnson

11.  The trouble with us in America isn’t that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy.  –Louis Kronenberger

12.  The trouble with this country is that there are too many people going about saying “the trouble with this country is. . . .”  –Sinclair Lewis

13.  I feel most at home in the United States, not because it is intrinsically a more interesting country, but because no one really belongs there any more than I do.  We are all there together in its wholly excellent vacuum.  –Wyndham Lewis

14.  Sitting at the table doesn’t make you a diner, unless you eat some of what’s on that plate.  Being here in America doesn’t make you an American.  Being born here in America doesn’t make you an American.  –Malcolm X

15.  America is like one of those old-fashioned six-cylinder truck engines that can be mssing two sparkplugs and have a broken flywheel and have a crankshaft that’s 5,000 millimeters off fitting properly, and two bad ball-bearings, and still runs.  We’re in that kind of situation.  We can have substantial parts of the population committing suicide and still run and look fairly good.  –Thomas McGuane

16.  Double, no triple, our troubles and we’d still be better off than any other people on earth.  It is time that we recognized that ours was, in truth, a noble cause.  –Ronald Reagan

17.  America is a great country, but you can’t live in it for nothing.  –Will Rogers

18.  I sometimes think that the saving grace of America lies in the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans are possessed of two great qualities – a sense of humor and a sense of proportion.  –Franklin D. Roosevelt

19.  Europe was created by history.  America was created by philosophy.  –Margaret Thatcher

20.  The biggest difference between ancient Rome and the USA is that in Rome the common man was treated like a dog.  In America he sets the tone.  This is the first country where the common man could stand erect.  –I.f. Stone

21.  On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.  –Gore Vidal

22.  America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.  –Oscar Wilde

23.  No, the real American has not yet arrived.  He is only in the Crucible.  I tell you – he will be the fusion of all races, perhaps the coming superman.  –Israel Zangwill

24.  You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else.  –Winston Churchill

25.  Americans have different ways of saying things.  They say “elevator,” we say “lift”. . . they say “President,” we say “stupid psychopathic git.”  –Alexai Sayle

26.  We Americans live in a nation where the medical-care system is second to none in the world, unless you count maybe 25 or 30 little scuzzball countries like Scotland that we could vaporize in seconds if we felt like it.  –Dave Barry

27  We can have no “50-50” allegiance in this country.  Either a man is an American and nothing else, or he is not an american at all.  –Theodore roosevelt

28.  Half of the American people have never read a newspaper.  Half never voted for President.  One hopes it is the same half.  –Unknown

29.  All great change in America begins at the dinner table.  –Ronald Reagan

30.  I don’t measure America by its achievements but by its potential.  –Shirley Chisholm

 

31.  I just want to say this.  I want to say it gently but I want to say it firmly:  there is a tendency for the world to say to America, “the big problems of the world are yours; you go and sort them out.”  and then to worry when America wants to sort them out.  –Tony Blair

32.  There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.  –Bill Clinton

33.  America’s one of the finest country anyone ever stole.  –Bobcat Goldthwaite

34.  America is the greatest, freest, and most decent society in existence.  It is an oasis of goodness in a desert of cynicism and barbarism. This country, once an experiment unique in the world, is now the last best hope for the world.  –Dinesh D’Souza

35.  America has never been an empire.  We may be the only great power in history that had the chance, and refused – preferring greatness to power and justice to glory.  –George W. Bush

36.  This is the story of America.  Everybody’s doing what they think they’re supposed to do.  –Jack Kerouac

37.  I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason:  I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.  –James  Arthur Baldwin

38.  America’s future will be determined by the home and the school.  the child becomes largely what he is taught; hence, we must watch what we teach, and how we live.  –Jane Addams

39.  American consumers have no proble with carcinogens, but they will not purchase any product, including floor wax, that has fat in it.  –Dave Barry

40.  It cound probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly American criminal class except Congress.  –Mark Twain

41.  I think the most un-American thing you can say is, “You can’t say that.”  –Garrison Keillor

42.  I believe America’s best days are ahead of us because I believe that the future belongs to freedom, not to fear.  –John Kerry

43.  Americans have more food to eat than any other people and more diets to keep them from eating it.  –Unknown

44.  What’s right about America is that although we have a mess of problems, we have great capacity – intellect and resources – to do something about them.  –Henry Ford

45. America is a tune. It must be sung together. –Gerald Stanley Lee

46. What is the essence of America? Finding and maintaining that perfect, delicate balance between freedom “to” and freedom “from.” –Marilyn vos Savant

47. When an American says that he loves his country, he means not only that he loves the New England hills, the prairies glistening in the sun, the wide and rising plains, the great mountains, and the sea. He means that he loves an inner air, an inner light in which freedom lives and in which a man can draw the breath of self-respect. –Adlai Stevenson

48. How often we fail to realize our good fortune in living in a country where happiness is more than a lack of tragedy. –Paul Sweeney

49. This country will not be a good place for any of us to live in unless we make it a good place for all of us to live in. –Theodore Roosevelt

50. Some Americans need hyphens in their names, because only part of them has come over; but when the whole man has come over, heart and thought and all, the hyphen drops of its own weight out of his name. –Woodrow Wilson

51. We on this continent should never forget that men first crossed the Atlantic not to find soil for their ploughs but to secure liberty for their souls. –Robert J. McCracken

52. What we need are critical lovers of America – patriots who express their faith in their country by working to improve it. –Hubert H. Humphrey

53. We have enjoyed so much freedom for so long that we are perhaps in danger of forgetting how much blood it cost to establish the Bill of Rights. –Felix Frankfurter

54. A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. –Edward Abbey

55. Posterity: you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it. –John Quincy Adams

56. It is easy to take liberty for granted, when you have never had it taken from you. –Dick Cheney

57. Don’t expect to build up the weak by pulling down the strong. –Calvin Coollidge

58. True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else. –Clarence Darrow

59. Of all the supervised conditions for life offered man, those under U S A’s constitution have proved the best. Wherefore, be sure when you start modifying, corrupting or abrogating it. –Martin H. Fischer

60. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves. –Abraham Lincoln

My country, ’tis of Thee,
Sweet Land of Liberty
Of thee I sing;
Land where my fathers died,
Land of the pilgrims’ pride,
From every mountain side
Let Freedom ring.

My native country, thee,
Land of the noble free,
Thy name I love;
I love thy rocks and rills,
Thy woods and templed hills,
My heart with rapture thrills
Like that above.

Let music swell the breeze,
And ring from all the trees
Sweet Freedom’s song;
Let mortal tongues awake;
Let all that breathe partake;
Let rocks their silence break,
The sound prolong.

Our fathers’ God to Thee,
Author of Liberty,
To thee we sing,
Long may our land be bright
With Freedom’s holy light,
Protect us by thy might
Great God, our King.

Our glorious Land to-day,
‘Neath Education’s sway,
Soars upward still.
Its hills of learning fair,
Whose bounties all may share,
behold them everywhere
On vale and hill!

Thy safeguard, Liberty,
The school shall ever be,
Our Nation’s pride!
No tyrant hand shall smite,
While with encircling might
All here are taught the Right
With Truth allied.

Beneath Heaven’s gracious will
The stars of progress still
Our course do sway;
In unity sublime
To broader heights we climb,
Triumphant over Time,
God speeds our way!

Grand birthright of our sires,
Our altars and our fires
Keep we still pure!
Our starry flag unfurled,
The hope of all the world,
In peace and light impearled,
God hold secure!

–Samuel F. Smith

And now, tradition compels me to watch Independence Day again.  It’s one of my favorite movies.