What is America?....

What is America? What makes our country more than any other piece of land and water on the globe? Nothing – except our ideal of human freedom, freedom for the individual! Because we have this ideal we, almost alone among the peoples today, have hope. We still dare to hope. 

You can easily see that ideals are the most important things in the world. Indeed they are. They are the food of the soul, which nourishes the spirit with faith and with hope. When hope and faith are gone, when we say, “ideals are only talk,” the soul dies and the spirit grows weak and then the tyrants take over. We must keep our ideals alive, we cannot let them die, for they alone give us the strength of hope and faith to other peoples.

-PEARL S. BUCK