America is a nation with many ...

America is a nation with many flaws, but hopes so vast that only the cowardly would refuse to acknowledge them.
America is a nation with many flaws, but hopes so vast that only the cowardly would refuse to acknowledge them.
 James A. Michener

More phrases

If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.
What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.
We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.
I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.
A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

Quotes from the same author

. . . Luddites were those frenzied traditionalists of the early 19th century who toured [England] wrecking new weaving machines on the theory that if they were destroyed . . . old jobs and old ways of life could be preserved . . . At certain times in his life each man is tempted to become a Luddite, for there is always something he would like to go back to. But to be against all change-against change in the abstract-is folly.
 James A. Michener
I am a humanist because I think humanity can, with constant moral guidance, create reasonably decent societies. I think that young people who want to understand the world can profit from the works of Plato and Socrates, the behaviour of the three Thomases, Aquinas, More and Jefferson - the austere analyses of Immanuel Kant and the political leadership of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.
 James A. Michener
All I can do is play the game the way the cards fall.
 James A. Michener
An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.
 James A. Michener
organizations like the church or General Motors promote a man up and up until he reaches a spot which he is obviously incapable of filling, and there they lay him to rest.
 James A. Michener