Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations. 1989.
| NUMBER: | 267 |
| AUTHOR: | Sam Rayburn (1882–1961) |
| QUOTATION: | It has always been my ambition since childhood to live such a life that one day my fellow citizens would call me to membership in this popular branch of the greatest lawmaking body in the world. Out of their confidence and partiality they have done this. It is now my sole purpose here to help enact such wise and just laws that our common country will by virtue of these laws be a happier and a more prosperous country. I have always dreamed of a country which I believe this should be and will be, and that is one in which the citizenship is an educated and patriotic people, not swayed by passion and prejudice, and a country that shall know no East, no West, no North, no South, but inhabited by a people liberty loving, patriotic, happy, and prosperous, with its lawmakers having no other purpose than to write such just laws as shall in the years to come be of service to human kind yet unborn. [Applause] |
| ATTRIBUTION: | Representative He was echoing Henry Clay’s famous words, “I know no South, no North, no East, no West to which I owe any allegiance. I owe allegiance to two sovereignties, and only two;… My allegiance is to this Union and to my State.”—Clay, remarks in the Senate, February 14, 1850, Congressional Globe, vol. 19, p. 368. |
| SUBJECTS: | Congress |