Independence

Another good 4th of July. I'll really miss 4th of July back home. We would barbecue, play baseball, and watch fireworks. The fireworks were cool even though they were far away. We provided our own Patriotic music which was nice. Ya know, I love America! I love our history, what it stands for, what it should stand for, what it is, and everything about it. Going abroad always really makes me miss America and the securities we have here. God bless America. I found some awesome quotes and stories:

There is a legend about the day of our nation's birth in the little hall in Philadelphia, a day on which debate had raged for hours. The men gathered there were honorable men hard-pressed by a king who had flouted the very laws they were willing to obey. Even so, to sign the Declaration of Independence was such an irretrievable act that the walls resounded with the words "reason, the gallows, the headsman's axe," and the issue remained in doubt.

The legend says that at that point a man rose and spoke. He is described as not a young man, but one who had to summon all his energy for an impassioned plea. He cited the grievances that had brought them to this moment and finally, his voice falling, he said, "They may turn every tree into a gallows, every hole into a grave, and yet the words of that parchment can never die. To the mechanic in the workshop, they will speak hope; to the slave in the mines, freedom. Sign that parchment. Sign if the next moment the noose is around your neck, for that parchment will be the textbook of freedom, the Bible of the rights of man forever."

He fell back exhausted. The 56 delegates, swept up by his eloquence, rushed forward and signed that document destined to be as immortal as a work of man can be. When they turned to thank him for his timely oratory, he was not to be found, nor could any be found who knew who he was or how he had come in or gone out through the locked and guarded doors.

It also commemorates the only true philosophical revolution in all history.

Oh, there have been revolutions before and since ours. But those revolutions simply exchanged one set of ruls for another. Ours was a revolution that changed the very concept of government.

Let the Fourth of July always be a reminder that here in this land, for the first time, it was decided that man is born with certain God-given rights; that government is only a convenience created and managed by the people, with no powers of its own exept those voluntarily granted to it by the people.

-Ronald Reagan

(Isn't that a cool story?!! I took a class called Principles of Founding of the American Republic and we discussed those things a lot, how America was the first nation to recognize rights of people. It is our ideology.)


A thoughtful mind, when it sees a Nation's flag, sees not the flag only, but the Nation itself; and whatever may be its symbols, its insignia, he reads chiefly in the flag the Government, the principles, the truths, the history which belongs to the Nation that sets it forth.

-Henry Ward Beecher

"The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors: they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood, and transmitted them to us with care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men."
-Samuel Adams

(I've heard through older family members that we're direct descendants of Samuel Adams. I haven't been able to find the line yet, but I believe it. His cousin John Adams is my hero.

"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

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

(Ok, I'm not a Bill Clinton fan, but that is a GOOD quote)

"This nation will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave."
-Elmer Davis

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."
-Abraham Lincoln

A man's feet must be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
-George Santayana