#america

Now, I normally do not like it when people sing near me, much less at me. I don't care if they're good, bad, or mediocre. It's all the same. Unless you're signed to a major label with music I can find on iTunes, I don't want to hear your live performance. It's why I can't watch American Idol. I keep worrying the contestants will mess up and be embarrassed, and then I'll be embarrassed for them. ↗

— Lauren Morrill

#itunes #singing #music

Being a copper I like to see the law win. I'd like to see the flashy well-dressed mugs like Eddie Mars spoiling their manicures in the rock quarry at Folsom, alongside of the poor little slum-bred guys that got knocked over on their first caper amd never had a break since. That's what I'd like. You and me both lived too long to think I'm likely to see it happen. Not in this town, not in any town half this size, in any part of this wide, green and beautiful U.S.A. We just don't run our country that way. ↗

— Raymond Chandler

#corruption #crime #injustice #justice #money

What I care about is whether or not a leader will work with America's working people, whether or not a leader cares about responsibility and honest work and whether or not a leader will fight to keep the American Dream alive. ↗

— Richard Trumka

#alive #america #american #american dream #care

Trains are beautiful. They take people to places they've never been, faster than they could ever go themselves. Everyone who works on trains knows they have personalities, they're like people. They have their own mysteries. ↗

— Sam Starbuck

#engineer #mysteries #the-dead-isle #trains #beauty

We think there's a huge opportunity in smaller vehicles. Smaller vehicles done in an American way. ↗

— Freeman Thomas

#american way #done #huge #huge opportunity #opportunity

Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she'd invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words--"friend" and "real" and "story" and "change"--words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like "identity" and "search" and "cloud," had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had "American" become an ironic term? How had "democracy" come to be used in an arch, mocking way? ↗

— Jennifer Egan

#democracy #disgust #language #web #wit

There is no "slippery slope" toward loss of liberties, only a long staircase where each step downward must first be tolerated by the American people and their leaders. ↗

— Alan K. Simpson

#american people #downward #each #first #leaders

She must have been debating staying in the line or forcing me to run home and change. ↗

— Kiera Cass

#change

You know, they were returning to the language of the people and trying to use musical language, particularly as Copland did to create a musical language in which all Americans would feel that they had a stake. ↗

— Michael Tilson Thomas

#copland #create #did #feel #had

Buffett was a billionaire who drove his own car, did his own taxes, and still lived in a home he had bought in 1958 for $31,500. He seemed to answer to a deeply rooted, distinctly American mythology, in which decency and common sense triumphed over cosmopolitan guile, and in which an idealized past held firm against a rootless and too hurriedly changing present. ↗

— Roger Lowenstein

#capitalist #warren-buffett #change