Quotes for Thanksgiving

I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, and then I killed them and took their land.
-Jon Stewart

Thou that hast giv'n so much to me, Give one thing more, a gratefull heart.
-George Herbert

Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday, the twenty- sixth of November next, to be devoted to the service of that great and glorious Being . . . for the kind care and protection of the people of this country, previous to their becoming a nation; for the signal manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his providence, in the course and conclusion of the late war . . . for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enabled to establish Constitutions of Government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national one now lately instituted.
-George Washington

Gluttony and surfeiting are no proper occasions for thanksgiving.
-Charles Lamb

We should love our native land were it a sterile rock; but we love it better when to our cultivation it yields an ample increase; and the farmer, instead of sighing for foreign dainties, looks up to heaven, and depends on his own labours; and when they are crowned with a blessing, he thanks God, as tens of thousands throughout our State are doing this day. Let us join our voices with theirs.
-Sarah Josepha Hale

Our Thanksgiving Day, becoming the focus, as it were, of the private life and virtues of the people, should be hallowed and exalted, and made the day of generous deeds and innocent enjoyments, of noble aspirations and heavenly hopes.
-Sarah Josepha Hale

I awoke this morning with a devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new. Shall I not call God the Beautiful, who daily showeth himself to me in his gifts?
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ah! on Thanksgiving day, when from East and from West, From North and from South come the pilgrim and guest, When the gray-haired New Englander sees round his board The old broken links of affection restored, When the care-wearied man seeks his mother once more, And the worn matron smiles where the girl smiled before, What moistens the lip and what brightens the eye? What calls back the past, like the rich Pumpkin pie?
-John Greenleaf Whittier

I . . . invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.
-Abraham Lincoln

Our honest Puritan festival is spreading, not as formerly, as a kind of opposition Christmas, but as a welcome prelude and adjunct, a brief interval of good cheer and social rejoicing, heralding the longer season of feasting and rest from labor in the month that follows.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Thanksgiving Day. Let us all give humble, hearty, and sincere thanks, now, but the turkeys. In the island of Fiji they do not use turkeys; they use plumbers. It does not become you and me to sneer at Fiji.
-Mark Twain

[Thanksgiving] as founded by th' Puritans to give thanks f 'r bein' presarved fr'm th' Indyans, an' we keep it to give thanks we are presarved fr'm th' Puritans.
-Philip Dunne

Folks is go'gin' me wid goodies, an' dey's treatin' me wid caih, An' I's fat in spite of all dat I kin do. I's mistrus'ful of de kin'ness dat's erroun' me evahwhaih, Fu' it's jest' too good, an' frequent, to be true.
-Paul Laurence Dunbar

From pestilence, fire, flood, and sword We have been spared by thy decree, And now with humble hearts, O Lord, We come to pay our thanks to thee.
-Paul Laurence Dunbar

Thanksgiving Day! In the days of our founders, they were willing to give thanks for mighty little, for mighty little was all they expected. . . . Those old boys in the Fall of the year, if they could gather a few pumpkins, potatoes and some corn for the Winter, they was in a thanking mood. But if we can't gather in a new car, a new radio, a new tuxedo and some Government relief, we feel like the world is agin us.
-Will Rogers

When the gales of coming winter outside your window howl, When the air is sharp and cheery so it drives away your scowl, When one's appetite craves turkey and will have no other fowl, It's Thanksgiving time!
-Langston Hughes

What we're really talking about is a wonderful day set aside on the fourth Thursday of November when no one diets. I mean, why else would they call it Thanksgiving?
-Erma Bombeck

Thanksgiving, if there is to be any at all, must begin and end with God. Once we have been able to liberate Thanksgiving from the clutches of the Pilgrim mystique as well as from the countercultural clutches of the protesters, and once we have been liberated from the "count-your-many-blessings-name-them-one-by-one" routine, we will have made a significant step in that process of redeeming the familiar.
-Peter J. Gomes

On Thanksgiving at our house we like variety, so we don't have turkey every year. Last year we had a swan. It was nice; everyone got some neck.
-George Carlin

I happen to be on record with an explanation of why we can't have our Thanksgiving Day that much earlier: Americans all begin their Christmas shopping on the day after Thanksgiving, and if they started their Christmas shopping in the middle of October they'd run out of money sometime in November. The people who are hard to shop for wouldn't get any presents at all.
-Calvin Trillin