I invite all American Live Leakers -- regardless of your race, religion, ethnicity or political affiliation -- to proudly display the American flag as your avatar here on Live Leak through July 4th. Show the haters that we stand together proud and untarnished as we celebrate the birth of our nation.

When an American says that he loves his country, he means not only that he loves the New England hills, the prairies glistening in the sun, the wide and rising plains, the great mountains, and the sea. He means that he loves an inner air, an inner light in which freedom lives and in which a man can draw the breath of self-respect. ~Adlai Stevenson

National honor is national property of the highest value. ~James Monroe, first inaugural address, 4 March 1817

Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Poet," Essays, Second Series, 1844

If our country is worth dying for in time of war let us resolve that it is truly worth living for in time of peace. ~Hamilton Fish

Ours is the only country deliberately founded on a good idea. ~John Gunther

Then join hand in hand, brave Americans all!
By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall.
~John Dickinson

Oh, it's home again and home again, America for me!
I want a ship that's westward bound to plough the rolling sea
To the blessed land of Room Enough beyond the ocean bars,
Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars.
~Henry Van Dyke

Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well, that is the way I know I am an American. America is the only idealistic nation in the world. ~Woodrow Wilson

This, then, is the state of the union: free and restless, growing and full of hope. So it was in the beginning. So it shall always be, while God is willing, and we are strong enough to keep the faith. ~Lyndon B. Johnson

"Our country, right or wrong." When right to be kept right; when wrong to be put right. ~Carl Schurz

Off with your hat, as the flag goes by!
And let the heart have its say;
you're man enough for a tear in your eye
that you will not wipe away.
~Henry Cuyler Bunner

Some Americans need hyphens in their names, because only part of them has come over; but when the whole man has come over, heart and thought and all, the hyphen drops of its own weight out of his name. ~Woodrow Wilson

The winds that blow through the wide sky in these mounts, the winds that sweep from Canada to Mexico, from the Pacific to the Atlantic - have always blown on free men. ~Franklin D. Roosevelt

There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America. ~William J. Clinton