American Ethos Video Materials

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave to every living heart and hearth-stone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

–Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address (1861)

There is a dream in the land
With its back against the wall.
By muddled names
and strange
Sometimes the dream is called.

There are those who claim
This dream for theirs alone –
A sin fro which we know
They must atone.

Unless shared in common
Like sunlight and like air,
The dream will die for lack
Of substance anywhere.

The dream knows no frontier or tongue,
The dream no class or race. 
The dream cannot be kept secure
In any one looked place.

This dream today embattled,
With its back against the wall – 
To save the dream for one
It must be saved for ALL –
Our dream of freedom!

Langston Hughes, Dream of Freedom

“But in this country we have one great privilege which they don’t have in other countries. When a thing gets to be absolutely unbearable the people can rise up and throw it off. That’s the finest asset we’ve got – the ballot box.”

–Mark Twain

“America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.”

–Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

–Martin Luther King, Jr.

“The time is always right to do what is right.”

–Martin Luther King, Jr.

“in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors…Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion…”

–Abigail Smith Adams

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”

–Frederick Douglass

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