#america

Ahead and to the west was our ranger station - and the mountains of Idaho, poems of geology stretching beyond any boundaries and seemingly even beyond the world. ↗

— Norman Maclean

#geology #idaho #landscape #mountains #nature

Ours is a shockingly dead view of creation. We ourselves are the only things in the universe to which we grant an authentic vitality, and because of this we are not fully alive. ↗

— Frederick Turner

#nature #western-philosophy #nature

The country and culture commonly known as "America" had had a badly split personality all through its history. Its overt laws were almost always puritanical for a people whose covert behavior tended to be Rabelaisian; its major religions were all Apollonian in varying degrees---its religious revivals were often hysterical in a fashion almost Dionysian. ↗

— Robert A. Heinlein

#religion #religion

I saw in their eyes something I was to see over and over in every part of the nation- a burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from any Here. They spoke quietly of how they wanted to go someday, to move about, free and unanchored, not toward something but away from something. I saw this look and heard this yearning everywhere in every states I visited. Nearly every American hungers to move. ↗

— John Steinbeck

#perceptive #travel #perception

Why did the Articles [of Confederation] fail so completely? Most historians believe the founding fathers spent a great deal of their first constitutional convention drafting the delaration of independence and only realized on July 3rd the Articles were also due. ↗

— Jon Stewart

#confederation #constitution #failure #independence

So the American government lied to the Native Americans for many, many years, and then President Clinton lied about a relationship, and everyone was surprised! A little naïve, I feel! ↗

— Eddie Izzard

#bill-clinton #clinton #lying #native-americans #president

It will take time to restore chaos ↗

— George W. Bush

#bush #george-bush #idiot #president #president

I'm a bit retarded, like most Americans. ↗

— Henry Miller

#cancer

A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time. When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, The one I feed the most. ↗

— George Bernard Shaw

#good-and-evil #humanity #native-americans #self-determination #fighting

I had all the characteristics of a human being—flesh, blood, skin, hair—but my depersonalization was so intense, had gone so deep, that my normal ability to feel compassion had been eradicated, the victim of a slow, purposeful erasure. I was simply imitating reality, a rough resemblance of a human being, with only a dim corner of my mind functioning ↗

— Bret Easton Ellis

#ellis #purpose