Quotations from What America Means to Me

• p. 94
  The divisions among and between peoples of the world form always a curious criss-cross pattern. There is no one way of dividing us. We are different races, and that is a division. We are different nations, and that is a division. Religion is a division, and wealth is a division and education is a division. Climate and geography and food have their dividing effects, and so has history. But war is the great simplifier.

• p. 95
  But it is always true that when great changes occur among human beings, there is an instant strengthening, too, of the old.

• p. 96
  But this strange awful war is little enough understood by any of us. Why are we fighting? What brought us into this mortal combat? ... The real roots of this war, I believe, are deep in the essential difference between those who cling to the old concept of the nation of the division unit of mankind and those who see the new concept of the peoples.

• p. 96
  Science has, more than any other thing, taught us to think in terms of the universe. The very business of working with scientific methods, of thinking in scientific terms, as well as the fruits of science, have led us to universality.

• p. 96-97
  The scientifically mechanical means which have brought nations close together physically have at the same time destroyed the mental and spiritual boundaries of those nations, so that today there are people in many nations who are closer together, through their ideas and their feelings and desires -- through their temperments in a word -- than they are to other persons of their own nation and race. The passing of physical barriers has enabled these persons to find each other. They are not limited, any more, to one nation.

• p. 97
  What then? Are we to do away with nations? Certainly not. All of us need a physical home to love and cherish, to improve and beautify. All of us, for conveniences in daily life, if for nothing else, need a sound and useful local political organization.

• p. 97
  Today, man's thought includes the globe.

• p. 98
  If arms could win any war, they might be able to win this war, for yesterday's men can handle a gun and shoot it off as well as anybody. Unfortunately it take wit and wisdom as well as a gun to win this war.

• p. 98
  Our enemies are those who refuse to allow freedom to be the atmosphere of the world, and who would set up one nation or one race over another. Our allies are those who demand the atmosphere of freedom and human equality for all.

• p. 99
  But it [freedom and human equality] is not only the American way. It is also the Chinese way. Long before any American put the way into words, Chinese had put it into words. Today there are people in many nations who have chosen this way of life and who have put it into words. Russia, with bloodshed and contradiction, has put it into practice, imperfect but actual. Indians in India are trying to put it into practice.

• p. 99
  Men's minds cannot fight in yesterday and win, however modern the weapon in their hands.

• p. 100
  We differ in one important regard, however, from the people's of Asia. Race has never been a cause for any division among those peoples. But race prejudice divides us deeply, and hampers more than anything else our development toward a free people in a free world.

• p. 101
  For there is a solid part of ourown American people who will not sacrifice, even for the sake of victory in this war, their prejudices again color. They had rather yield to Hitler than to give up their belief in the necessity for the white man to be supreme.

• p. 102
  Why are we afraid of simplicity? Simple questions go deep and the answers, if they are honest, go deeper still.

• p. 103
  Can our people continue a free people in a world of peoples not free? The answer is inevitably, No.

• p. 103
  We know now that most of the money we make and the food we eat and the clothes we wear and the furniture we would like to buy and the pleasure trips we would like to take have to be given up, and we have given them up.

• p. 103
  We want to let the muddle in our minds stand while we fight. We want to freeze our souls until after the war. It cannot be done. No great war can be won without the spirit behind the weapons. The mind must be clear and the soul free before men can fight a war for freedom and win it.

• p. 104
  To harbor race prejudice in our own people automatically puts us on the wrong side.

• p. 105
  Those who will not give up their prejudices which endanger our war effort far me than hoarding and bootlegging forbidden materials, will probably not change. The mind that doggedly insists on prejudice often has not intelligence enough to change.

• p. 105
  It is time for us to remember that today Japan is master of more of the world than we are, and that Japan is not white.

• p. 105
  Whether we like it or not, race has ceased to be a human division, and it is the realist's duty to proclaim the truth. All the stubbornness of minds that live in the past will not remove the truth from the earth.

• p. 106
  This is a war between peoples and the battlefield is everywhere.