Quotes About America

As Arnold had demonstrated, the real enemy was not Great Britain, but those Americans who sought to undercut their fellow citizens' commitment to one another. Whether it was Joseph Reed's willingness to promote his state's interests at the expense of what was best for the country as a whole or Arnold's decision to sell his loyalty to the highest bidder, the greatest danger to America's future came from self-serving opportunism masquerading as patriotism.

What Mayer did in the thirties? what he was situated to do as a Jew yearning to belong? was provide reassurance against the anxieties and disruptions of the time. He did this by fashioning a vast, compelling national fantasy out of his dreams and out of the basic tenets of his own dogmatic faith? a belief in virtue, in the bulwark of family, in the merits of loyalty, in the soundness of tradition, in America itself.

America had been taught that beauty only resided in youth, especially in the female.

Here in America a man ain't a man unless he's got three or four whores and a late model car. All right, I'm a little drunk. Maybe that's why I mock myself. But put a new car and 3 women on my back and I'm fucked. I don't have a t.v. I don't even have a radio. A big Brazilian cunt who wants to put that thing on me, calls me the last of the monsters.

That's what he told me. He said that in America you have to spend your money or they'll take it away. Now they can't take mine away: I don't have any.

The first European adventurers in the Western Hemisphere did not make careful population counts, but they repeatedly described indigenous America as a crowded, jostling place—"a beehive of people," as Las Casas put it in 1542. To Las Casas, the Americas seemed so thick with people "that it looked as if God has placed all of or the greater part of the entire human race in these countries.

we begin to appreciate the enormity of the calamity, for the distintegration of native America was a loss not just to those societies but to the human enterprise as a whole. Having grown separately for millennia, the Americas were a boundless sea of novel ideas, dreams, stories, philosophies, religions, moralities, discoveries, and all the other products of the mind. Few things are more sublime or characteristically human than the cross-fertilization of cultures.

The whole colonial experience of trying to solve a related series of 'Indian problems' had much to do with giving the colonists an identity indissolubly linked to America

American cops are so heavily militarized these days that the only way I can tell the difference between them and the army is the color of their body armor—that, and the army is less trigger-happy.

A powerful glamour has engulfed the United States of America. It's not the first time, of course—that nation is a shining temple to amnesia with its foundations built atop the bones of vanished empires

America is the place where you cannot kill your Government by killing the men who conduct it. The only way you can kill government in America is by making the men and women of America forget how to govern. —Woodrow Wilson, 1919

In America, Walt Disney opened an amusement park. And in Florence, someone was savaging the remnants of a Tuscan nobleman's family.

Good Lord, half of America was pretty sure their own president was a Russian puppet.

This too is a jihad. Yet we Americans find ourselves in the dangerous position of going to war not against a state but against a phantom. The jihad we have embarked upon is targeting an elusive and protean enemy. The battle we have begun is never-ending. But it may be too late to wind back the heady rhetoric. We have embarked on a campaign as quixotic as the one mounted to destroy us.

Thomas Paine is America's single great revolutionary theorist. We have produced a slew of admirable anarchists (Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, Dorothy Day, and Noam Chomsky), and radical leaders have arisen out of oppressed groups (Sitting Bull, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Cornel West, and bell hooks). But we do not have a tradition of revolutionists. This makes Paine unique.

By the time they were done, America's progressive and radical movements, which had given the country the middle class and opened up our political system, did not exist. It was upon the corpses of these radical movements, which had fought for the working class, that the corporate state was erected in the late twentieth century.

Violence in America is not restricted to state violence. There is a tradition of vigilante violence that is used, usually with the state's tacit if unofficial blessing, to crush dissent, to keep repressed minorities in a state of fear, or to exact revenge on those the state has branded as traitors. It is a product of hatred, not hope. It is directed against the weak, not the strong. And it is deeply ingrained in the American psyche.

Vigilante groups in America do not trade violence for violence. They are mostly white men who often prey on people of color and radicals. They are capitalism's ideological vanguard, its shock troops used to break populist movements and tyrannize the oppressed. And they will be unleashed against any mass movement that seriously threatens the structures of capitalist power and calls for rebellion.

Miller captures in the play the darkest pathology of white America—the inability to accept who we are, where we came from, acknowledge and take responsibility for the crimes we committed and with that understanding access where we are going and who we want to become. The danger of self-delusion is the central point of Miller's play.

It was a potent reminder why most European states and America live in such opulence and determine the fate of so many others. We equip and train the most efficient killers on the planet.

I think America was a miracle. I think God loves this country.

I think with 'Hamilton,' Lin-Manuel has really blown up the whole casting idea. It's miraculous. You look at '1776,' it's a bunch of old white guys and old white chicks. You look at 'Hamilton,' and it's just the faces of America.

America must be a light to the world, not just a missile.

The federal government... knows how to put a missile in someone's room half way around the world with technology. Why don't we use some of that technology to save some lives here in America?