A Quote by Douglas Brinkley

It's very important that we keep these special, wild places. It defines the United States. Imagine our country without our national parks and our monuments. Here in California, imagine if you didn't have in Southern Cal the Channel Islands or the great Highway 1, Big Sur up to Point Reyes up to the Redwood country.
There are over 400 parks in all 50 states that represent our country and that are enriched with stories that tell about how our country became what it is today. There is a lot of history frozen in these places.
Imagine a country where the vast majority of seniors live in poverty, a country where for many there are no golden years, but a time of struggle and dependence. That was the United States before the creation of Social Security, which has proven to be one of the most effective and important government programs in our history.
When I ran against George Bush Sr. in 1992, and we did very well in New Hampshire, and then we went on to California, it was four, five months later, I got 30 percent in the counties in Southern California, because Californians wanted us to do something about thousands of people walking into our country on weekends, and the president of the United States and the government of the United States, unlike General Eisenhower who dealt with it, did nothing. And that's what Trump is riding.
It is important that the remaining scenic areas of the country be at once made into State or National Parks. Fortunately there still are a number of these wild places, but it will require effort to save them. Each Park proposed will have powerful and insidious opposition. The insidious opposition to National Parks will say, ‘There is a feeling in Congress that we should not have any more National Parks at this time’; or, ‘We should wait until present ones are improved.’
There are certain things that Americans expect their government to do. Our infrastructure is vitally important. Putting people back to work with construction is important. Our roads, our bridges, our sewers, our waterways, our dams - this is what makes our country so special.
Going to the Huntington gardens and libraries was radically important for me. They have one of the best collections of 18th- and 19th-century British portraiture that you can imagine in Southern California. One doesn't think about Southern California as being the capital of great art.
If our culture is so often readily and easily appropriated, imagine what happens when we embrace our full blackness and know that our contributions are just as important to the shaping of the country and, more broadly, the world.
Let the people walk. Or ride horses, bicycles, mules, wild pigs-anything-but keep the automobiles and the motorcycles and all their motorized relatives out. We have agreed not to drive our automobiles into cathedrals, concert halls, art museums, legislative assemblies, private bedrooms and other sanctums of our culture; we should treat our national parks with the same deference, for they, too, are holy places.
There is nothing so American as our national parks. The scenery and the wildlife are native. The fundamental idea behind the parks is native. It is, in brief, that the country belongs to the people, that it is in process of making for the enrichment of the lives of all of us. The parks stand as the outward symbal of the great human principle.
I feel that at this point in our country's history, it is important that we not reverse marriage equality, that we not reverse Roe v. Wade, that we stand up against Citizens United, we stand up for the rights of people in the workplace, that we stand up and basically say: The Supreme Court should represent all of us. That's how I see the court, and the kind of people that I would be looking to nominate to the court would be in the great tradition of standing up to the powerful, standing up on behalf of our rights as Americans.
There is the National Flag. He must be cold, indeed, who can look upon its folds rippling in the breeze without pride of country. If he be in a foreign land, the flag is companionship and country itself, with all its endearment...The very colors have a language which was recognized by our fathers; white is for purity; red, for valor; blue, for justice. And altogether, bunting, stripes, stars, and colors, blazing in the sky, make the flag of our country, to be cherished by all our hearts, to be upheld by all our hands.
We can imagine our bodies being destroyed, our brains ceasing to function, our bones turning to dust, but it is harder - some would say impossible - to imagine the end of our very existence.
I can only say this, a very, very important element of any country, but our country, and in my opinion, the single most important thing that a president can do is the defense of our country.
The United States is a great, great country, but it's not the only country, and we can learn a great deal beyond our own shores.
I think that it has to be a very humane approach to this issue, and we have to come up with solutions to it. But we also have to do something about the drugs that are coming across our southern border that are killing our kids... I think there are some people who want to leave this country and return to the country they came from, but obviously it requires a broader solution that that, and we all know that.
Our society is only as healthy as our most vulnerable citizens. It is unconscionable that the weakest links in our country are our hungry children. No other Western industrialized nation has widespread hunger within its borders. We really must put an end to hunger in the United States if we are to keep our prosperity and protect the future.
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