Quotes About American

The result is that children now live in an "ethos of fantasy consumerism." Modern American childhood, says Cross

The paradox of this arrangement was not lost on Lewis Mumford, who described suburbia as "a collective effort to live a private life." In many ways, this goes to the heart of the matter, for it is a project based on self-contradiction—the tragedy of American domestic

We are telling the American people to have patience, courage, resolve and determination.

Obama has no power to change American policy because there are people who specialize in drawing these policies, which have been and still are hostile towards Islam.

The Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, regulating the railroads, was one of the first federal regulatory acts in American history. The Act began with a bill introduced in the House by Democratic Representative James H. Hopkins of Pittsburgh, in 1876 at the behest of a group of independent oil producers of western Pennsylvania.

The history of American wars is littered with propaganda, falsehoods, a compliant media, the manipulation of patriotic sentiment—everything we've seen recently, we've seen before. Time and again.

Ever since the New Deal, those on the Right have sensed the American polity's transformation with growing discomfort, but around 2009, when the Tea Party movement mobilized, that discomfort turned to anger.

So-called end-time speculation, which is the daily bread of many in the American religious right, is not unconnected to the agenda of some of America's leading politicians.

The theatrical performance of politicians who profess to speak for an "American People" do nothing to highlight the history of poverty.

In the larger scheme of things, the modern complaint against state intervention echoes the old English fear of social leveling, which was said to encourage the unproductive. In its later incarnation, government assistance is said to undermine the American dream. Wait. Undermine whose American dream?

exploitation was the modus operandi of the English projectors who conceived an American colonial system at the end of the sixteenth century—before there were colonies.25

large numbers of early American colonists spent their entire lives in such dingy, nasty conditions.

Unique among the American settlements, Georgia was not motivated by a desire for profit.

The tall tales we unthinkingly absorb when young somehow remain within; the result is a narrowly conceived sense of national belonging productive of the most uncompromising of satisfying myths: "American exceptionalism." We are unique and different, and the absence of class is one of our hallmarks.

Indeed, it was not the United States, but Liberia, a country founded by the British and former American slaves, that first established universal suffrage for adult men, in 1839.

At all times, white trash remind us of one of the American nation's uncomfortable truths: the poor are always with us. A preoccupation with penalizing poor whites reveals an uneasy tension between what Americans are taught to think the country promises—the dream of upward mobility—and the less appealing truth that class barriers almost invariably make that dream unobtainable.

Thus the Puritan family was at no time the modern American nuclear family, or anything close. It was often composed of children of different parents, because one or another parent was likely to die young, making remarriage quite common. Winthrop fathered sixteen children with four different wives, the last of whom he married at age fifty-nine, two years before his death.

According to scholars, religions can be boiled down to the three Bs, "behaving," "believing," and "belonging," but I, like many American Jews, don't do so good on these. Several generations ago Jews "behaved" more like Jews, or at least they would perform or refrain from certain behaviors because they were Jews.

The men came from every imaginable economic and social level of American life, "men who were better dressed in their uniforms than ever before in their lives," as Zelda wrote later, "and men from Princeton and Yale who smelled of Russian Leather and seemed very used to being alive…." The larger world that Zelda dreamed of was at her doorstep and accessible.

Long before pragmatism was developed into a full-blown American philosophy (see chapter 8), it had already been formulated and practiced by evangelical leaders.

Chaim Potok wrote two novels that I think are indispensable to understanding the Hasidic and Orthodox American Jewish communities following the Holocaust: The Chosen and My Name Is Asher Lev.

I say to my colleagues never confine your best work, your hopes, your dreams, the aspiration of the American people to what will be signed by George W. Bush because that is too limiting a factor.

Let's just do what is right for the American people. And those of us who are involved in politics and government know that our responsibility is to the American people, that we have a responsibility to find our common ground, to seek it and to find it.

Something untoward was happening to middle-class American women, an undercurrent of i change was seeping through heir ideas about duties and obligations as mothers, eroding their desire to conform to madonna-like models of unconditional devotion to the young child to adapt a more managerial concept of mother as coordinator and motivator of her child's activities and interests.