Quotes About America

I think that in America there are certain kinds of problems and in Russia there are certain kinds of problems, but basically, when you find people who start from a position where human beings are at the core, as opposed to a position where profit is at the core, the solutions can be very different

Rather than the idyllic picture created by false nostalgia, the fifties were really straight white america's cooling-off period of "let's pretend we're happy and that this is the best of all possible worlds and we'll blow those nasty commies to hell if they dare to say otherwise.

Traditionally, in american society, it is the members of oppressed, objectified groups who are expected to stretch out and bridge the gap between the actualities of our lives and the consciousness of our oppressor. For in order to survive, those of us for whom oppression is as american as apple pie have always had to be watchers, to become familiar with the language and manners of the oppressor, even sometimes adopting them for some illusion of protection.

I think that in America there are certain kinds of problems and in Russia there are certain kinds of problems, but basically, when you find people who start from a position where human beings are at core, as opposed to a position where profit is at the core, the solutions can be very different.

CAPTAIN. America? That's a pretty dreadful place, isn't it? Nothing but rednecks! KURT [gloomily]. Well, it's not Copenhagen. ALICE

Like any oppressed people, they defined themselves by what offended them, which would give New England its gritty flavor and, it has been argued, America its independence.

Franklin informed his caller that the colonies understood precisely what they were doing, "for we know that separated both countries must become weak; but there is this difference, Great Britain will always remain weak; America after a time, will grow strong.

In Europe pedigree might be all, "but it is a commodity that cannot be carried to a worse market than to that of America, where people do not enquire concerning a stranger, what is he? but what can he do?

The quiet folks of America, who had played by all the rules and were now sweating in the frog pot, wanted someone who not only didn't care about speaking the King's English or living the rules of high society but openly mocked what the professional finger shakers from the media, academia, Hollywood, and politicians of both parties thought.

Generalizations about the negative results of day care in America are extremely suspect, since the United States, unlike Europe, has almost no national legislation establishing a minimum quality of care. Most studies thus average together both high-quality and low-quality child-care situations.

The breakdown of the wall separating marriage from nonmarriage has been described by some legal historians and sociologists as the deinstitutionalization or delegalization of marriage or even, with a French twist, as demariage. I like historian Nancy Cott's observation that it is akin to what happened in Europe and America when legislators disestablished their state religion.

How the Swans Came to the Lake: A Narrative History of Buddhism in America by Rick Fields (Boston: Shambhala, 1981), and my The Awakening of the West: The Encounter of Buddhism and Western

the story of colonial-era America, rerun across an infinite frontier...All of which was fine, until the day you needed root-canal dentistry. Or your e-book reader broke down. Or you worried whether your kids were ever going to learn anything more than how to plough a field or trap a rabbit. Or you got sick of the mosquitoes. Or, damn it, you just wanted to go shopping .

It's the way our founding fathers would have wanted it, if they had founded corporations instead of just a country.

Luckily, a recent survey published in the American Sociological Review revealed that atheists are the least trusted group in America—less trusted, even, than homosexuals. It makes sense at least we trust the homosexuals with our hair.

That's what's great about America: that our freedom of religion allows me to interpret the Bible exactly how it fits my worldview already.

America is exceptional. Does that statement shock you? It shocks me to have to say it! To be forced by your doubt to say out loud that America is exceptional implies something ugly. It's like telling the host of a dinner party 'I'm certain your wife is a female.' Saying it out loud just feels wrong. No matter how big her hands are.

As the governor scanned it, Swim explained. "Liberal progressive policies for the last fifty years or so have devastated the poor people of America. Welfare; aid to dependent families; food stamps; essentially free medical care; schools that try to prepare everyone for a four-year college degree, when only a fraction of the poor people will ever want or get one; lack of technical training; the breakdown of the black family—all those things have led us to where we are.

Grafton was silent, looking at nothing for a moment or two. Finally, he said, "Soetoro has been waiting for a terror strike so he could declare martial law, become a dictator, and fix all the things he doesn't like about America.

They found seats. The train was crowded, as usual. The young men looked around and were pleased to see that there were no uniformed police, no armed guards of any type, not that they expected any. This was America, the most under-policed nation on earth.

America's oldest debating union, founded in Princeton by James Madison, Aaron Burr, and others, is called the Cliosophical Society in her honor.

The ethnic tilt produced a backlash of virulent racism, as seen in the federal Chinese Exclusion Act in 1862, which set a moratorium on Chinese immigration for ten years, at a time when every other nationality was setting out for America daily.

They had become a fixed star in the shifting firmament of the high school's relationships, the acknowledged Romeo and Juliet. And she knew with sudden hatefulness that there was one couple like them in every white suburban high school in America.

Whenever anything happens in America, they have to gold-plate it, like baby shoes. That way you can forget it.