Happy 4th of July from Following the Equator

"We are fearfully and wonderfully made, and we glorious Americans will occasionally astonish the God that created us when we get a fair start."
- "The Bolters in Convention," Territorial Enterprise, 12/30/1863

"We are called the nation of inventors. And we are. We could still claim that title and wear its loftiest honors if we had stopped with the first thing we ever invented, which was human liberty."

- Foreign Critics speech, 1890

"The average American may not know who his grandfather was. But the American was, however, one degree better off than the average Frenchman who, as a rule, was in considerable doubt as to who his father was."

- quoted in "Stories of Mark Twain," C. D. Williard, Pacific Outlook, 4/30/1910