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Theodore Roosevelt "There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism.... A hyphenated American is not an American at all... Americanism is a matter of the spirit, and of the soul...The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans...each preserving its separate nationality.... The men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated Americans.... There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American." "Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president...." "Every man among us is more fit to meet the duties and responsibilities of citizenship because of the perils over which, in the past, the nation has triumphed; because of the blood and sweat and tears, and labor and the anguish, through which, in the days that have gone, our forefathers moved on to triumph." "A just war is in the long run far better for a nation's soul than the most prosperous peace obtained by acquiescence in wrong or injustice. Moreover, though it is criminal for a nation not to prepare for war, so that it may escape the dreadful consequences of being defeated in war, yet it must always be remembered that even to be defeated in war may be better than not to have fought at all." |