Quotes About American

With the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, a new American laissez-faire had been officially declared. If lots more incorrect and preposterous assertions circulated in our most massive mass media, that was a price of freedom. If splenetic commentators could now, as never before, keep believers perpetually riled up and feeling the excitement of being in a mob, so be it.

Such a colossal irony: after socialists and Communists in the 1930s and then the New Left in the 1960s had tried and failed to achieve a radical class-based reordering of the American political economy, the economic far right took its shot at doing that in the 1970s and succeeded beyond anyone's wildest hope or fear.

During the previous centuries in the entire world, there had been perhaps two hundred reported cases of multiple personality disorder; during the 1970s, the decade of Sybil, there were around four hundred, mainly among American women, especially highly hypnotizable women.

The Beats' self-conception descended from a particular American lineage—mountain men, outlaws, frontier cranks, lonely individualists, and narcissistic outsiders sounding their barbaric yawps over the rooftops of the world. The hippie dream that followed drew as well from a parallel lineage—Cane Ridge, the communes of the 1830s and '40s, Transcendentalism, pastoralism, Thoreau. Both were enactments of classic American fantasies.

Extreme American gun love really is a lot like American religious faith.

Mix the Protestant impulse to find the meaning and purpose in everything with the Enlightenment's empiricism, and you get our American mania for connecting all the dots,*5 irrationality in rationalist drag.

the stories of the supremely successful entrepreneurs obscure the forgotten millions of losers and nincompoops. The fabulous successes seem like proof of the power of passionate belief in oneself, our American faith in faith.

As we let a hundred dogmatic iterations of reality bloom, the eventual result was an anything-goes relativism that extends beyond religion to almost every kind of passionate belief: If I think it's true, no matter why or how I think it's true, then it's true, and nobody can tell me otherwise. That's the real-life reductio ad absurdum of American individualism. And it would become a credo of Fantasyland.

The Puritans are conventionally considered more "moderate" than the Pilgrims. This is like calling al-Qaeda more moderate than ISIS. The Massachusetts Bay Colony Puritans were no less mad... They forbade Church of England clergy from setting foot in their new American theocracy in Boston and Salem, hung Quakers, and passed a law to hang any Catholic priests who might dare show up.

Protestantism has been that it gave a self-righteous oomph to moneymaking and capitalism—hard work accrues to God's glory, success looks like a sign of His grace. But it seems clear to me the deeper, broader, and more enduring influence of American Protestantism was the permission it gave to dream up new supernatural or otherwise untrue understandings of reality and believe them with passionate certainty.

A MAIN ARGUMENT of this book concerns how so many parts of American life have morphed into forms of entertainment. From 1980 to the end of the century, that tendency reached a tipping point in politics and the political discourse.

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.

High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.

And the American people…" His voice faded for a moment. "They faint if someone uses insensitive language in their presence and half of them couldn't run up a set of stairs if you put a gun to their heads. What'll happen if the real shit hits the fan?

These people were complete fucking idiots. And worse, they were complete fucking idiots who thought they were geniuses. The most dangerous kind, but just the kind the American people loved to vote for.

CENTERVILLE VIRGINIA USA

Come on, it's an American tradition. Apple soup? Mom's homemade chicken pie?' She chuckled in spite of herself, then winced. 'It's apple pie and Mom's homemade chicken soup. But you didn't do badly, for a start.

the American Meddle Association—the group that is dedicated to making all the money for medical doctors possible, no matter how

It was the most moving experience of my life," he wrote, "and the knowledge of what the ambulances contained made it still more poignant." It was with that episode in mind that he concluded his post mortem: "The results attained were made possible only by the superlative quality of American officers, American men and American equipment. No country can stand against such an army.

I know in an existential sense that life can change on a dime ... something has instantly and inexorably changed in American life.

Nearly every study shows that competition from cheap foreign labor undercuts the wages of American workers and legal immigrants.

I want to die at a hundred years old with an American flag on my back and the star of Texas on my helmet, after screaming down an Alpine descent on a bicycle at 75 miles per hour. I want to cross one last finish line as my wife and my ten children applaud, and then I want to lie down in a field of those famous French sunflowers and gracefully expire, the perfect contradiction to my once anticipated poignant early demise.

The real 1960s began on the afternoon of November 22, 1963. It came to seem that Kennedy's murder opened some malign trap door in American culture, and the wild bats flapped out.

A day cannot live in infamy without the nourishment of rage. Let's have rage. What's needed is a unified, unifying, Pearl Harbor sort of purple American fury.