United States

🇺🇸Abraham Lincoln

Politics

1744–1786

"They believe that the Congress of the United States has no power under the Constitution to interfere with the institution of slavery in the different States."

🇺🇸Ernest Hemingway

Literature

1899–1961

"In the morning there was a big wind blowing and the waves were running high up on the beach and he was awake a long time before he remembered that his heart was broken."

🇺🇸Mark Twain

Literature

1835–1910

"There is nothing in the world like a persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus and upset the convictions and debauch the emotions of an audience not practised in the tricks and delusions of oratory."

🇺🇸Carl Sagan

Science

1934–1996

"For a long time the human instinct to understand was thwarted by facile religious explanations."

🇺🇸Thomas Jefferson

Politics

"The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them."

🇺🇸Ralph Waldo Emerson

Literature

Western philosophy

1803–1882

"He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses."

🇺🇸Richard Feynman

Science

1918–1988

"This conference was worse than a Rorschach test: There's a meaningless inkblot, and the others ask you what you think you see, but when you tell them, they start arguing with you!"

🇺🇸Benjamin Franklin

Politics

1812–1878

"How much more than is necessary do we spend in Sleep! forgetting that The sleeping Fox catches no Poultry,[Sept. 1743] and that there will be sleeping enough in the Grave,[Sept. 1741] as Poor Richard says."

🇺🇸William James

Psychology

pragmatism

1842–1910

"The impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race."

🇺🇸John Locke

Philosophy

Enlightenment

1943–2006

"The life of man in a state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

🇺🇸Henry David Thoreau

Literature

Western philosophy

1817–1862

"I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.."

🇺🇸Edgar Allan Poe

Literature

Romanticism

1872–1961

"Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger, portion of truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant."

🇺🇸James Joyce

Literature

1870–1931

"His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or revery, he had heard their tale before."

🇺🇸Martin Luther King Jr.

Social Activism

civil rights movement

1929–1968

"Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy to a friend."

🇺🇸Emily Dickinson

Literature

1830–1886

"Dickinson on Poets.org Biography, related essays, and reading guides, from the Academy of American Poets"

🇺🇸William Blake

Art

Romanticism

"Time is the mercy of Eternity; without Time's swiftness Which is the swiftest of all things, all were eternal torment."

🇺🇸Walt Whitman

Literature

Transcendentalism

1819–1892

"Thunder on! Stride on! Democracy. Strike with vengeful stroke!"

"If anyone is crazy enough to want to kill a president of the United States, he can do it. All he must be prepared to do is give his life for the president's."

🇺🇸Noam Chomsky

Philosophy

atheism

b. 1928

"Roughly speaking, states are violent to the extent that they have the power to act in the interests of those with domestic power..."

🇺🇸Theodore Roosevelt

Politics

1858–1919

"Let us speak courteously, deal fairly, and keep ourselves armed and ready."

🇺🇸Frederick Douglass

Social Activism

abolitionism

1818–1895

"The destiny of the colored American … is the destiny of America."

🇺🇸Kahlil Gibran

Literature

Symbolism

1922–2008

"Darkness may hide the treesand the flowers from the eyesbut it cannot hidelove from the soul."

🇺🇸Cormac McCarthy

Literature

1933–2023

"People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there."

🇺🇸F. Scott Fitzgerald

Literature

modernism

1896–1940

"If you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them."

🇺🇸Christopher Hitchens

Philosophy

atheism

1949–2011

"Peace through Strength," surely history's most exploded nostrum."

🇺🇸Susan Sontag

Literature

1933–2004

"The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is."

🇺🇸Thomas Mann

Literature

"The beautiful word begets the beautiful deed."

🇺🇸Rollo May

Philosophy

1909–1994

"Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about."

🇺🇸Sylvia Plath

Literature

1932–1963

"How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this, I need someone to pour myself into."

🇺🇸Philip Roth

Literature

1933–2018

"The New York Times Featured Author: Philip Roth"

🇺🇸Richard Rorty

Philosophy

Pragmatism

1931–2007

"My principal motive is the belief that we can still make admirable sense of our lives even if we cease to have … "an ambition of transcendence.""

🇺🇸Adam Smith

Economics

Enlightenment

"When the profits of trade happen to be greater than ordinary, over-trading becomes a general error both among great and small dealers."

🇺🇸Booker T. Washington

Literature

1856–1915

"There is no power on earth, that can neutralize the influence of a high, pure, simple and useful life."

🇺🇸Thomas Pynchon

Literature

1760–1796

"Out and down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and sensuality in all its forms, with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to soil those cathedrals, white marble statues, noble thoughts."

🇺🇸Milton Friedman

Economics

1903–2006

"Thank heaven that we don’t get all of the government that we are made to pay for."

🇺🇸Franklin D. Roosevelt

Politics

1882–1945

"The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum"

🇺🇸Maya Angelou

Literature

1928–2014

"I don't trust people who don't love themselves and tell me "I love you." … There is an African saying which is: "Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt."

🇺🇸John Steinbeck

Literature

1902–1968

"If lowborn men could stand up to those born to rule, religion, government, the whole world would fall to pieces......So it would; so it will ... then the pieces will be put together again by such as destroyed it."

🇺🇸Robert Frost

Literature

1874–1963

"Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offence. Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That wants it down."

🇺🇸Toni Morrison

Literature

1931–2019

"What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them."