Political Quotes

“our Founders did not give us a perfect nation. Even they knew that. When Thomas Jefferson, himself a slaveowner, reflected on the existence of slavery in a nation which claimed to believe that all men are created equal, he wrote: ``I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.'' Jefferson was not alone as a slaveowner. George Washington--the namesake of this great city and another great State, the father of our Nation--and his wife owned 300 slaves. Just minutes before he died, he asked his wife to bring the two copies of his last will for him to look at for one last time and to decide. He handed one of the copies of the wills to his wife and said: Burn this one, and keep the other. What he burned would have released all of his slaves at the moment of his death. The one he signed said that they would continue to be his wife's slaves for as long as she lived. He was the father of our Nation. We might not have had an independent nation without his skill and leadership; yet he was not a perfect man by any means. The true measure of a nation's greatness is not simply the words written by an earlier generation; it is the work of every generation to make those words not just ideals but facts. We see that work all around us today. For weeks, Americans have joined together in an incredible display of constitutional petition of this government, of this Nation, for change.…”