In conjunction with America in the Making, artist and Phillips Academy alumnus Peter Halley ’71 has created a site-specific wall mural for the Elson Art Center. Halley invited Phillips Academy faculty and others to submit quotations by writers, artists, and other cultural figures that encapsulate their perspectives on the question “What is America?” These quotes are brought together in a vibrant, optically dynamic work that invites reflection on the many ways America is experienced, understood, and imagined.
This project has been supported by the Edward E. Elson Artist-in-Residence Fund.
We invite you to submit a quote drawn from history, books, music, film or pop culture that encapsulates your perspective on the query “What is America?” and to explore what others have shared, below.
submit a quote
Quotes Contact Form
submitted quotes
| NAME | QUOTE | ATTRIBUTION |
|---|---|---|
| Anonymous | The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder's moral perceptions are known and conceded the world over; and a priveleged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name. | "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court," Mark Twain |
| Sarah Scherini | One of the curses of history is that we cannot go back and change the course leading to disasters, no matter how much we might wish to. The past has its own terrible inevitability. | Heather Cox Richardson |
| Anonymous | .... So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. | F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Great Gatsby" |
| Ei Smith | Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. | James Baldwin |
| Sergia Hay | I say to you today, my friends, though, even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." | Martin Luther King Jr., "I Have a Dream," March on Washington 1963 |
| Anonymous | Our historical destiny—Latin America’s and North America’s—is to navigate this entire boat together. | Gabriel García Márquez |
| Raynard Kington | ...We will see that the true miracle was not the birth of the Constitution, but its life, a life nurtured through two turbulent centuries of our own making, and a life embodying much good fortune that was not. | Thurgood Marshall, 1987 in his speech about the celebration of the constitution |
| Katie Gayman | Without the idealistic, strenuous and patriotic efforts of black Americans, our democracy today would most likely look very different — it might not be a democracy at all. | Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project |
| David Fox | I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. | James Baldwin, "Notes of a Native Son" |
| Megan Paulson | I believe that recognizing racial difference is an essential precondition to multiracial collaboration…we cannot talk about democracy in a multiracial society without also talking about race. | Lani Guinier, "More Democracy" |
| Kerin Miller | … Since the day I was taken from my mother I had suffered extreme indignities. People had stared at me. I had been tossed about in the air like a wooden puppet. And now my long hair was shingled like a coward’s! In my anguish I moaned for my mother, but no one came to comfort me. Not a soul reasoned quietly with me, as my own mother used to do; for now I was only one of many little animals driven by a herder. | Zitkala Sa from "The School Days of an Indian Girl" |
| Anonymous | One had better die fighting against injustice than to die like a dog or a rat in a trap. | Ida B. Wells |
| Anonymous | Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love, / A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother, / Chair’d in the adamant of Time. | "America" by Walt Whitman |
| Jeff Domina | The past is never dead. It's not even past. | William Faulkner, "Requiem for a Nun" |
| Jeff Domina | Shake everything you got. | Maceo Parker |
| Anonymous | The truth is, I’ve never cared for the National Anthem. If you think about it, it’s not a good song. Too high for most of us with “the rockets red glare” and then there are the bombs. (Always, always, there is war and bombs.) | "A New National Anthem" by Ada Limon |
| Anonymous | … In an 1883 address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the man who would go on to become the first president of the American Physical Society [Henry Rowland] argued that “the proper course of one in my position is to consider what must be done to create a science of physics in this country, rather than to call tele-graphs, electric lights and such conveniences by the name of science”. | David C. Cassidy, "When physics was ‘made in the USA,’ A Short History of Physics in the American Century" |
| Anonymous | O, let America be America again— / The land that never has been yet— / And yet must be—the land where every man is free. / The land that's mine—the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME— / Who made America, / Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, / Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain, / Must bring back our mighty dream again. | Langston Hughes, "Let America Be America Again" |
