Anthem Quotes

1. "Let's all sing the redneck national anthem: Settle for what you can get."
Author: Barbara Kingsolver

2. "People who tend to listen to my music have come back and said, 'Yo, this is my anthem. This is what I live by.'"
Author: Big Sean

3. "Tonight the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come marched in goose-step and raised a hand to salute "Heil Hitler!" Tonight the ghost wore a swastika on his armband instead of the simple red and white colors of Austria. And yet, on this silent night, the horrible specter seemed all but invisible in Vienna. Murphy could only wonder if he was the sole person at Sacher's who could hear the anthem of Hitler's hordes echoing distantly from beyond the mountains."
Author: Bodie Thoene

4. "Who can fail to mist at Fergie's anthem, 'My humps, my humps, my lovely lady lumps.' Hmmm. 'My lunch, my lunch, I swear it's coming up."
Author: Celia Rivenbark

5. "Jesus must have the crown of our heart's delight; we will not dishonour our Bridegroom by mourning in his presence. We are ordained to be the minstrels of the skies, let us rehearse our everlasting anthem before we sing it in the halls of the New Jerusalem."
Author: Charles H. Spurgeon

6. "For President Obama, 'home of the brave' are not just the last words of our national anthem, but also a call to action. This is why the president's policies and our platform include incentives to train and hire our troops returning home. Not only because of our moral responsibility, but because it makes for a stronger, more secure American economy."
Author: Cory Booker

7. "One reason Elvis mattered, she said, was that in his prime, pop music had still been politically innocent, therefore deeply life-affirming, therefore relevant. By the time he died, most pop songs had become, usually without the conscious intention of those who wrote and sang them, anthems endorsing the values of fascism, which remains the case to this day."
Author: Dean Koontz

8. "Their roar is around me. I am on the brink Of the great waters—and their anthem voiceGoes up amid the rainbow and the mist.Their chorus shakes the ground. I feel the rocksO'er which my feet hang idly—as they hungO'er babbling brooks in boyhood—quiveringUnder the burst of music. Awful voice! And strong, triumphant waters! Do I standIndeed amid your shoutings! Is it mineTo shout on this gray summit, where the bird,The cloudy, monarch bird shrieks from his crag,O'er which he's wheeled for centuries? I lift upMy cry in echo; but no sound is there,And my shout seems but whisper. Extract from the poem "Niagara" by Grenville Mellen, 1839."
Author: Deborah L. Halliday

9. "Lord Peter's library was one of the most delightful bachelor rooms in London. Its scheme was black and primrose; its walls were lined with rare editions, and its chairs and Chesterfield sofa suggested the embraces of the houris. In one corner stood a black baby grand, a wood fire leaped on a wide old-fashioned hearth, and the Sèvres vases on the chimneypiece were filled with ruddy and gold chrysanthemums. To the eyes of the young man who was ushered in from the raw November fog it seemed not only rare and unattainable, but friendly and familiar, like a colourful and gilded paradise in a mediæval painting"
Author: Dorothy L. Sayers

10. "Inside the coop where he'll stay until he's killed, the rooster sings anthems to liberty because he was given two roosts."
Author: Fernando Pessoa

11. "I seek and don't find myself. I belong to chrysanthemum hours, neatly lined up in flowerpots."
Author: Fernando Pessoa

12. "I look for myself but find no one. I belong to the chrysanthemum hour of bright flowers placed in tall vases. I should make an ornament of my soul."
Author: Fernando Pessoa

13. "In the newspapers I read a biography about an American. He left his whole huge fortune to factories and for the positive sciences, his skeleton to the students at the academy there, and his skin to make a drum so as to have the American national anthem drummed on it day and night."
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

14. "Hardly worth the effort, really," he muttered. "It's a homunculus lock. Only opens when a predefined set of factors is present. Could be it only opens when a redheaded lass sings the national anthem of Atlantis at three o'clock on a Thursday. Or when the light of the setting sun is reflected from a cracked mirror onto a goat's eye. Or when Mr. Grey hawks a bogey onto a purple newt. I've seen some good homunculus factors in my time, yar."
Author: G. Norman Lippert

15. "A good worship session needs to have some quiet intimate moments as much as those high anthemic moments. Too much of both is bad. If there are no valleys, there would be no mountains."
Author: Gangai Victor

16. "Autumn. It's crispness, it's anticipation, it's melancholia, it's cool breezes replacing summer's heat. It's long days in the field, a harvest festival when work's done, a cheering crowd in a football stadium, chrysanthemums punctuating a somber landscape. It's Halloween highjinx, pumpkins grinning toothy smiles, the crack of pecan pressed against pecan. It's the first curls of woodsmoke, fresh blisters from pushing a rake. It's crisp and fresh and mellow and snug, solemn and melancholy. And it's very, very welcome."
Author: Good Housekeeping Magazine

17. "What struck me as I began to study history was how nationalist fervor--inculcated from childhood on by pledges of allegiance, national anthems, flags waving and rhetoric blowing--permeated the educational systems of all countries, including our own. I wonder now how the foreign policies of the United States would look if we wiped out the national boundaries of the world, at least in our minds, and thought of all children everywhere as our own. Then we could never drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or napalm on Vietnam, or wage war anywhere, because wars, especially in our time, are always wars against children, indeed our children."
Author: Howard Zinn

18. "Too bad the freedom seemed like a prison.As his boots hit the mosaic floor at the bottom of the stairs, John Mellencamp's old-school, bic-lighter anthem echoed in his head-and though he'd always like the song okay, he'd never truly understood what it meant.Kind of wished that were still the case.Life goes on...long after the thrill of living is gone..."
Author: J.R. Ward

19. "A country isn't something concrete, composed of intertwined individuals interlocked together. That's absurd. A country is abstract, with some silly frilly flag and pomp and a song—a national anthem. But dust off the glitter, replace the flag, change the tune, and the people are still there, with their intertangled mesh of relationships that exist above and beyond mere country."
Author: Jarod Kintz

20. "Sure, politicians rob from us, the people—but only because it's in our best interest. If they didn't rob from us, somebody else would, and this other scoundrel wouldn't even bother to wrap the theft in an American flag. So really we should rejoice in being swindled, and group together as patriots, and sing national anthems, and smile because we're being looted by men and women who know the best thing for us is to have us believe they are the best thing for us—and that they are the best among us, and as such they deserve special privileges that we, the huddling masses, have no right to demand."
Author: Jarod Kintz

21. "It's time for a new National Anthem. America is divided into two definite divisions. The easy thing to cop out with is sayin' black and white. You can see a black person. But now to get down to the nitty-gritty, it's getting' to be old and young - not the age, but the way of thinking. Old and new, actually... because there's so many even older people that took half their lives to reach a certain point that little kids understand now."
Author: Jimi Hendrix

22. "It was a day as different from other days as dogs are from cats and both of them from chrysanthemums or tidal waves or scarlet fever."
Author: John Steinbeck

23. "Baseball isn't just a game. It's the smell of popcorn drifting in the air, the sight of bugs buzzing near the stadium lights,the roughness of the dirt beneath your cleats. It's the anticipation building in your chest as the anthem plays, the adrenaline rush when your bat cracks against the ball, and the surge of blood when the umpire shouts strike after you pitch. It's a team full of guys backing your every move, a bleacher full of people cheering you on. It's...life"
Author: Katie McGarry

24. "If I were a rock star, I'd have Taylor Swifted him and written one of those anthemic I don't love you anymore songs."
Author: Lauren Blakely

25. "Often used to justify a wrongdoing or a series of wrongdoings. Generally speaking, it is not an anthem by which people govern their lives. Not so, however, for Lindsey Johanson. She strove to make her personal talent"
Author: Leanne Davis

26. "The traditions of a nation are very important and the anthem written by Francis Scott Key in the early days of our nation should always be revered."
Author: Lee Greenwood

27. "Of course the people in the metro didn't see a thing!...what a joke! petrified ratlets! but they'll still come out to refute me! make claims!...that nothing got bombed!...squished! powdered! that the firmament was calm, and me, I imagined the whole thing! chrysanthemums, sprays, roses! why, there's no more any such thing as sky-hooking shrapnel than there is anal ice cream! it's all in my mind! hallucinations and bullshit! what a crook! but I repeat and reassert! shrapnel and fiery lace stretched from one end of the horizon to the other! with lots of glow-worms mixed in...and dancing purple fireflies..."
Author: Louis Ferdinand Céline

28. "Anytime I sing the anthem, it is an honor and my heart beats out of my chest."
Author: Luke Bryan

29. "Like the fires caught and fixed by a great colourist from the impermanence of the atmosphere and the sun, so that they should enter and adorn a human dwelling, they invited me, those chrysanthemums, to put away all my sorrows and to taste with a greedy rapture during that tea-time hour the all-too-fleeting pleasures of November, whose intimate and mysterious splendour they set ablaze all around me."
Author: Marcel Proust

30. "Why don't you get a haircut? You look like a chrysanthemum."
Author: P. G. Wodehouse

31. "The national anthem of Hell is 'I did it my way."
Author: Peter Kreeft

32. "We turned an anthem into an assignment, a poem into a job description."
Author: Rachel Held Evans

33. "Always the seer is a sayer. Somehow his dream is told; somehow he publishes it with solemn joy: sometimes with pencil on canvas, sometimes with chisel on stone, sometimes in towers and aisles of granite, his soul's worship is builded; sometimes in anthems of indefinite music, but clearest and most permanent, in words."
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson

34. "Then all the winds of Heaven ran to join hands and bend a shoulder, to bring down to me the sound of a noble hymn that was heavy with the perfume of Time That Has Gone.The glittering multitudes were singing most mightily, and my heart was in blood to hear a Voice that I knew.The Men of the Valley were marching again.My Fathers were singing up there.Loud, triumphant, the anthem rose, and I knew, in some deep place within, that in the royal music was a prayer to lift up my spirit, to be of good cheer, to keep the faith, that Death was only an end to the things that are made of clay, and to fight, without heed of wounds, all that brings death to the Spirit, with Glory to the Eternal Father, forever, Amen."
Author: Richard Llewellyn

35. "All you hear Catholics turning out these days are pop versions of the old Protestant anthems."
Author: Richard Morris

36. "For all karaoke freaks around the nation, "Total Eclipse of the Heart" is one of those sacred anthems. It's the kind of song that announces, "Dearly beloved, we have so totally gathered here today."
Author: Rob Sheffield

37. "The plants which stand next to dwarf trees in importance with the Chinese are certainly chrysanthemums, which they manage extremely well, perhaps better than they do any other plant."
Author: Robert Fortune

38. "I see the crowd singing 'Rock 'N Roll' or 'Back Road' at my concerts... they are anthems and they lift up your life."
Author: Rodney Atkins

39. "Are not couturiers the poets who, from year to year, from strophe to strophe, write the anthem of the feminine body?"
Author: Roland Barthes

40. "Crowds respond to anthemic choruses."
Author: Ryan Tedder

41. "Oh, for shame! Nancy, have you never seen Florrie's face in a chrysanthemum, or a rose?''Never.' I said. 'Though there was a flounder for sale on a fishmonger's barrow, in Whitechapel yesterday, and the likeness was quite uncanny. I very nearly brought it home..."
Author: Sarah Waters

42. "I think as a Canadian hockey player, you go through it in your mind so many times, being able to stand on that blue line and hear your national anthem play and being a gold medal champion, you dream of that. And then to be able to accomplish that and actually win a gold medal and represent your country its an amazing feeling."
Author: Sidney Crosby

43. "The organist was almost at the end of the anthem's long introduction, and as the crescendo increases the cathedral began to glitter before my eyes until I felt as if every stone in the building was vibrating in anticipation of the sweeping sword of sound from the Choir.The note exploded in our midst, and at that moment I knew our creator had touched not only me but all of us, just as Harriet had touched that sculpture with a loving hand long ago, and in that touch I sensed the indestructible fidelity, the indescribable devotion and the inexhaustible energy of the creator as he shaped his creation, bringing life out of dead matter, wresting form continually from chaos. Nothing was ever lost, Harriet had said, and nothing was ever wasted because always, when the work was finally completed, every article of the created process, seen or unseen, kept or discarded, broken or mended – EVERYTHING was justified, glorified and redeemed."
Author: Susan Howatch

44. "So . . . middle school? Awkward.Having a hobby that's different from everyone else's? Awkward. Singing the national anthem on weekends instead of going to sleepovers? More awkward. Braces? Awkward. Gain a lot of weight before you hit the growth spurt? Awkward. Frizzy hair, don't embrace the curls yet? Awkward. Try to straighten it? Awkward!So many phases!"
Author: Taylor Swift

45. "You take a bunch of people who don't seem any different from you and me, but when you add them all together you get this sort of huge raving maniac with national borders and an anthem."
Author: Terry Pratchett

46. "Egyptians undergo an odd personality change behind the wheel of a car. In every other setting, aggression and impatience are frowned upon. The unofficial Egyptian anthem "Bokra, Insha'allah, Malesh" (Tomorrow, God Willing, Never Mind) isn't just an excuse for laziness. In a society requiring millennial patience, it is also a social code dictating that no one make too much of a fuss about things. But put an Egyptian in the driver's seat and he shows all the calm and consideration of a hooded swordsman delivering Islamic justice."
Author: Tony Horwitz

47. "Belize: The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word "free" to a note so high nobody can reach it."
Author: Tony Kushner

48. "I hate America. I hate this country. It's just big ideas, and stories, and people dying, and people like you. The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word 'free' to a note so high nobody can reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on earth sounds less like freedom to me. You come to room 1013 over at the hospital, I'll show you America. Terminal, crazy and mean. I live in America, that's hard enough, I don't have to love it. You do that. Everybody's got to love something."
Author: Tony Kushner

49. "The white cracker who wrote the National Anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word "free" to a note so high nobody could reach it. That was deliberate."
Author: Tony Kushner

50. "...when you are constantly prevailing upon the kindness of strangers-as a hitchhiker must-it keeps you in a positive frame of mind. Call it Zen and the Art of Hitchhiking. The Way of the Lift. The chrysanthemum and the Thumb. Heady on beer and the sound of my own voice, the aphorisms spilled out unchecked."
Author: Will Ferguson

Anthem Quotes Pictures