America! America!

May God thy gold refine

Till all success be nobleness

And every gain divine!

Katherine Lee Bates
“America the Beautiful,”
1893

The march of Providence is so slow and our desires so impatient; the work of progress is so immense and our means of aiding it so feeble; the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing ways, and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope.

Robert E. Lee
Letter to Charles Marshall,
ca.1866

We in this country…are—by destiny rather than by choice—the watchmen on the walls of world freedom.

President John F. Kennedy
from the speech he did not live
to deliver in Dallas,
November 22, 1963