Colin Powell was one of the public figures who quoted this line and credited it to Alexis de Tocqueville — and Tocqueville never wrote it either. The earliest printing anyone has documented is a Labor Day message by Rev. John McDowell, reported in The Herald and Presbyter of 6 September 1922, in the form “America is great because America is good…” — and it is already credited to Tocqueville there, with no documentation, so the earliest known printing is also the earliest known instance of the false credit and the line’s author remains unidentified.
“America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great” Not Colin Powell. "America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great" has no known author. Powell was one of many public figures who quoted it and credited Alexis de Tocqueville — but it is not in Democracy in America. The earliest documented printing of the full wording is a Labor Day message by Rev. John McDowell in The Herald and Presbyter, 6 September 1922, in the form "America is great because America is good…" — and it already credits Tocqueville there, with no documentation. — Quotle.info
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Colin Powell. Use the credit shown above instead.
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? We couldn’t verify where this wording comes from, so there’s no rights status to give. Safe to present as an unverified or anonymous line — just don’t assert a specific author or source.
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In context
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Provenance
Where the line actually shows up in print
Earliest documented printing
The Herald and Presbyter, 6 September 1922, p. 8, col. 3
Occasion
A Labor Day message to the daily papers by Rev. John McDowell, reported in Rev. Clarence G. Reynolds’s “New York Letter”
Earlier partial variant
Empty Pews & Selections from Other Sermons on Timely Topics (Zeising, 1886), p. 35
Not found in
Democracy in America, first published 1835
I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her commodious harbors and her ample rivers, and it was not there. I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her fertile fields and boundless forests, and it was not there. … America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good America will cease to be great.
middle of the passage omitted
Opening and closing sentences as transcribed from The Herald and Presbyter of 6 September 1922 by Barry Popik ↗; the middle of the passage is omitted here. Note the wording: America is good, not she is good. The “she” form that circulates today is a smoothed variant; none of the specialist sources here dates it, though Pitney is already printing it in 1995.
1886 — A version of the passage without the memorable ending is already in print in Empty Pews & Selections from Other Sermons on Timely Topics by Madison Clinton Peters (Zeising, 1886), p. 35, where it closes on why America was great and free. Cited by Barry Popik ↗, who dates the variant to at least 1886.
1922 — The full wording appears in The Herald and Presbyter of 6 September 1922, p. 8, col. 3, inside Rev. Clarence G. Reynolds’s “New York Letter,” which notes that very few Labor Day sermons were preached that Sabbath because most pastors were still away, and that the daily papers instead carried a Labor Day message from Rev. John McDowell. McDowell closed that message with the passage and credited it to Alexis de Tocqueville — so the earliest documented printing is also the earliest documented instance of the false credit. Popik ↗ records that it is not known where McDowell got the quotation. Wikiquote ↗ cites the same 1922 printing.
1941, then a campaign trail — A 1941 book on religion and the American dream quoted the closing lines as Tocqueville’s and supplied no documentation; the full version surfaced eleven years later in an Eisenhower campaign speech, credited only to “a wise philosopher [who] came to this country,” per John J. Pitney Jr., “The Tocqueville Fraud” ↗. That book is Sherwood Eddy’s The Kingdom of God and the American Dream, as the Faith and History post on the quote notes ↗.
1982 onward — Ronald Reagan used it hedged — “It was once written that America is great because America is good” (Remarks at a White House luncheon, 8 December 1982 ↗). Michael A. Ledeen lists Eisenhower, Bill Clinton, Colin Powell, Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan among those who credited it to Tocqueville outright (Wikiquote, Misattributed ↗).
The exact wording asked about here — “she is good… she will cease to be great” — has no identified author and no traced first publication, so no copyright status can honestly be asserted for it. The closest documented printing, the “America is good” version in The Herald and Presbyter of 6 September 1922, was published in the United States before 1931 and would itself be in the public domain.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
Three layers of wrong credit
This is a quote with a chain of custody and nothing at the end of it. Each holder of the line credited the one before — and the earliest documented holder, in 1922, credited Alexis de Tocqueville too, with nothing to support it. The chain does not end in silence; it ends in an undocumented false credit whose own source nobody has found.
✕
The default false credit, in print since 1922Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) not in his work
“Nowhere do they appear in Democracy in America, or anywhere else in Tocqueville,” wrote John J. Pitney Jr. in “The Tocqueville Fraud” ↗ (The Weekly Standard, 13 November 1995). Wikiquote ↗ files it under Misattributed.
✕
Modern quote sites and social postsColin Powell he quoted it, he didn’t write it
Michael A. Ledeen names Powell among the public figures who attributed the line to Tocqueville, alongside Dwight Eisenhower, Bill Clinton, Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan (Tocqueville on American Character, 2001, p. 25, cited by Wikiquote ↗). Repeating a line is not authoring one, and no speech, book, letter or interview of Powell’s has ever been produced as its source.
~
OccasionallyRonald Reagan popularizer, not claimant
Reagan did more than anyone to make the line famous but never claimed it: on 8 December 1982 he introduced it as “It was once written that America is great because America is good…” and named no author (Reagan Foundation ↗). Hillary Clinton likewise used the short form without attribution in her Democratic convention acceptance speech, delivered on the closing night of the convention, 28 July 2016 — the quotation per Wikiquote ↗, which dates the speech a day late.
✓The earliest printing anyone has documented for the full wording is a Labor Day message by Rev. John McDowell in The Herald and Presbyter of 6 September 1922 — and it already credits Alexis de Tocqueville, with nothing offered to back the credit up. Barry Popik notes it is not known where McDowell got the quotation, so the author is still unidentified (Barry Popik ↗).
Context
Why this line keeps finding famous mouths
The sentence is built to travel. It is a chiasmus with a threat attached — it flatters the country and warns it in one breath, in twenty-one words a speaker can land without notes. That makes it irresistible at podiums, and it has been used from podiums for a century: an Eisenhower campaign speech, Ronald Reagan in 1982, Bill Clinton, Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, Colin Powell, and Hillary Clinton in her 2016 convention acceptance speech.
It also sounds like an outsider’s compliment, which is exactly why a visiting Frenchman became its host. But the shape of the original is a sermon, not a travelogue: the preacher hunts America’s greatness in her harbors, her rivers, her fertile fields and boundless forests, fails to find it, and finally finds it in her churches. Politicians kept the punchline and threw away the sermon — and somewhere in the discarding, the line lost its author for good.
A sermon’s punchline, stripped of its sermon, looking for a famous mouth.
The two wordings, and why the difference matters
The version documented in 1922 reads “America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good America will cease to be great.” The form circulating today usually substitutes “she” in one or both halves. None of the specialist sources here dates the “she” wording — Pitney prints it in 1995, but no one has shown where it started — which is one reason this page can point to a documented printing but not to an author or a first publication.
The chain of credit is worth reading backwards: quote sites credit Powell; Powell credited Tocqueville; the 1941 book that handed the line to twentieth-century politics credited Tocqueville and documented nothing; and the 1922 printing, nineteen years earlier still, already credited Tocqueville and documented nothing either. Every link passes the buck to the one before it, and the last link points at a Frenchman who never wrote the words — which is why the trail stops there rather than arriving anywhere.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1937–2021 · U.S. Army four-star general · Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, later Secretary of State
Born in Harlem on 5 April 1937, Colin Powell rose through the U.S. Army to four-star general, served as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from October 1989 to September 1993, and was Secretary of State from January 2001 to January 2005. He died on 18 October 2021. He is on this page not as an author but as a transmitter: Michael A. Ledeen names Powell among the public figures who repeated “America is great because America is good” and credited it to Tocqueville, and quote sites later dropped the middleman and pinned the line on Powell himself.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Earliest documented printing
Clarence G. Reynolds, “New York Letter” (quoting a Labor Day message by Rev. John McDowell), The Herald and Presbyter, September 6, 1922, p. 8, col. 3 — the earliest documented printing of the full wording, where McDowell already credits it to Alexis de Tocqueville without documentation, per Barry Popik, “America is great because she is good.” Not found in Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (first published 1835).
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great’?” Last verified 30 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/america-is-great-because-she-is-good-and-if-america-ever/