Quotes About America

It was so much fun to have the freedom to wander America, with no assignments. For 25 or 30 years I never had an assignment. These were all stories I wanted to do myself.

The trouble with America is that there are far too many wide-open spaces surrounded by teeth.

Yeah, I pledge allegiance, to the United States of America... I pledge an allegiance to see that someday they will live up to their promises, to the victims that they call citizens...

What followed was "a new kind of mass death," says urban historian Peter Norton, who charted the transformation in America's road culture during the 1920s. More than two hundred thousand people were killed in motor accidents in the United States that decade. Most were killed in cities. Most of the dead were pedestrians. Half were children and youths.

I propose another explanation: The reason so many Americans have become alienated from government since the poll of 1964 is that government really has become more incompetent and really has become alienated from the public it is supposed to serve. Political cycles and political fashion have nothing to do with it. American government isn't what it used to be.

Discarding the welfare state in favor of a universal basic income is no longer something that would be economically feasible in America's future. It is economically feasible right now.

pp. 6-7: I want America to return to the ideal of treating people as individuals, so I have to write a book that treats Americans as groups. But there's no way around it. Those of us who want to defend the American creed have been unwilling to say openly that races have significant group differences. Since we have been unwilling to say that, we have been defenseless against claims that racism is to blame for unequal outcomes. What else could it be? We have been afraid to answer candidly.

I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy.

Cranks are much too important. They are part of the other America—Greil Marcus's old, weird America. A charlatan is a crank with a book deal and a radio program and a suit in federal court. A charlatan succeeds only in Idiot America. A charlatan is a crank who succeeds too well. A charlatan is a crank who's sold out.

It was in America that Santa put on weight.

I made education the highest priority of my campaign - actually education and jobs - and the reason is a simple one: I think the future of America depends on it.

I love America," he'd tell us. We were going to make a million dollars manufacturing objects we had seen in dreams that night.

Making art in America is about saving one's soul.

And you think: no. It won't be somewhere else. It will be here, again, in Chinatown, next year, same place. To be yellow in America. A special guest star, forever the guest.

The reason no one will rent to them is the color of their skin, and although technically at this point in the story of America this reason for not renting to someone is illegal, the reality is, no one cares. The minor god of immigration has gotten Dorothy this far, but the real estate spirits have failed her. She and Wu rent in the only place they can go, which has the benefit of being a place they can afford. The Chinatown SRO.

The emperor's job was to present these plastic trays of steaming delicacies to a family of blond people somewhere in the middle of America, and then to bow to them, while off-screen, in the shadows, a gong sounded (and further off-screen, in the mists of history, you could hear the collective weeping of a civilization going back five thousand years).

I don't think the real America is in New York or on the Pacific Coast; personally, I like the Middle West much better, places like North and South Dakota, Minneapolis and Saint Paul. There, I think, are the true Americans

Freedom does not come without a price. We may sometimes take for granted the many liberties we enjoy in America, but they have all been earned through the ultimate sacrifice paid by so many of the members of our armed forces.

And it is awful here, there is no other way to say it. But I believe that Detroit is America's city. It was the vanguard of our way up, just as it is the vanguard of our way down. And one hopes the vanguard of our way up again. Detroit is Pax Americana...America's way of life was built here.

Mainstream America is depending on you - counting on you - to draw your sword and fight for them. These people have precious little time or resources to battle misguided Cinderella attitudes, the fringe propaganda of the homosexual coalition, the feminists who preach that it's a divine duty for women to hate men, blacks who raise a militant fist with one hand, while they seek preference with the other.

I remember a great America where we made everything. There was a time when the only thing you got from Japan was a really bad cheap transistor radio that some aunt gave you for Christmas.

I happen to believe America is dying of loneliness, and we as people have are into the stream of convenience and turn away from our deep lives.

I happen to believe that America is dying of loneliness, that we, as a people have bought into the false dream of convenience, and turned away from a deep engagement with our internal lives.

I happen to believe that America is dying of loneliness, that we, as a people, have bought into the false dream of convenience, and turned away from a deep engagement with our internal lives—those