#american

Harry had worked his way through the American Dream and come to the conclusion that is was composed of a good lunch and a deep red wine that could soar. ↗

— Colum McCann

#conclusions #food #red-wine #dreams

The American Dream is a constant reminder that America's true nature and distinctive grandeur is in promising the common man, thr man on the make, a better chance to succeed here than common men enjoy anywhere else on earth. Pursuing the American Dream, 9, 269 ↗

— Cal Jillson

#dreams

the American nation today is infantile so much as adolescent—that is ambivalent in its twin desire for both authoritarian structure and the end of parental hegemony ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#dreams

In times of war or peace the US will gladly pay a man to fail should his heart be in it, a small shimmering proof of the American dream. ↗

— Jonathan Culver

#army #failure #soldiers #united-states #usa

I'm saying the American way is to overcome, to conquer, to come out on top. And we do it by spending and eating and screwing our women harder than anyone else. That's all I'm saying. ↗

— Neil LaBute

#united-states #dreams

the Reagan years "produced one of the most dramatic redistributions of income in the nation's history....The income of families in the bottom decile fell by 10.4 percent...while the income of those in the top one percent rose by 87.1 percent." Chain Reaction, 23 ↗

— Thomas B. Edsall

#justice #dreams

Now the line is: Forget the classics, concentrate on an education for the 21st century! Which apparently means knowing how to operate electronic devices and figure out a spreadsheet. That's not education, it's vocational training. What once were means seem to have become ends in education. And our more with-it "educators" shift with every passing wind, clutching at the latest gimmick the way drowning men do at straws. ↗

— Paul Greenberg

#demise #education #today #education

I am an American; free born and free bred, where I acknowledge no man as my superior, except for his own worth, or as my inferior, except for his own demerit. ↗

— Theodore Roosevelt

#equality #freedom #independence #individuality #liberty

However, not only are fortunes equal in America, equality extends to some degree to intelligence itself. I do not think that there is a single country in the world where, in proportion to the population, there are so few ignorant and, at the same time, so few educated individuals as in America. Primary education is available to all; secondary is within reach of no one, which can be explained quite easily as the inevitable result, so to speak, of my argument above. Almost all Americans enjoy a life of comfort and can, therefore, obtain the first elements of human knowledge. In America there are few rich people; therefore, all Americans have to learn the skills of a profession which demands a period of apprenticeship. Thus America can devote to general learning only the early years of life. At fifteen, they begin a career; their education ends most often when ours begins. If education is pursued beyond that point, it is directed only towards specialist subjects with a profitable return in mind. Science is studied as if it were a job and only those branches are taken up which have a recognized and immediate usefulness. ↗

— Alexis de Tocqueville

#education

Millions of tears have fallen for black sons, brothers, lovers, and friends whose assailants took or maimed their lives and then simply went on their way. ↗

— Aberjhani

#african-americans #antiracism #equality #george-zimmerman #justice