#american

That was when I realized we weren’t born to be slaves. It was ignorant for any man to think he could be the master of another. We were all meant to be free, and somewhere there were good people helping to heal this broken world. ↗

— Jay Grewal

#american-history #black-history #civil-war #equality #faith

But when they brought Sabira out, the crowd parted almost magically. A sea of hands rose faster than a swell and a bidding war commenced, amongst these civilized gentlemen who made their living off the backs of slaves. ↗

— Jay Grewal

#black-history #equality #slavery #equality

How a member of the church—one who had read the Good Lord’s bible—could sit so calmly and watch a man be led to his destruction frightened me. ↗

— Jay Grewal

#black-history #civil-war #equality #justice #slavery

After listening to a lot of these stories, I began to think that American loneliness is a completely different creature from anything we experience in this country, and it made me glad I was born Japanese. The type of loneliness where you need to keep struggling to accept a situation is fundamentally different from the sort you know you'll get through if you just hang in there. ↗

— Ryū Murakami

#japan #life #loneliness #struggle #experience

Foisting an identity on people rather than allowing them the freedom and space to create their own is shady. ↗

— Raquel Cepeda

#freedom-of-thought #hispanic #identity #immigrant-experience #latino-americans

It's not Americans I find annoying; it's Americanism: a social disease of the postindustrial world that must inevitably infect each of the mercantile nations in turn, and is called 'American' only because your nation is the most advanced case of the malady, much as one speaks of Spanish flu, or Japanese Type-B encephalitis. It's symptoms are a loss of work ethic, a shrinking of inner resources, and a constant need for external stimulation, followed by spiritual decay and moral narcosis. You can recognize the victim by his constant efforts to get in touch with himself, to believe his spiritual feebleness is an interesting psychological warp, to construe his fleeing from responsibility as evidence that he and his life are uniquely open to new experiences. In the later stages, the sufferer is reduced to seeking that most trivial of human activities: fun. ↗

— Trevanian

#satire #social-commentary #experience

There are some of us who have to pay for our faith every step of the way and who have to work out dramatically what it would be like without it and if being without it would be ultimately possible or not. ↗

— Flannery O'Connor

#paul-elie #faith

The history of American politics is littered with bodies of people who took so pure a position that they had no clout at all. ↗

— Benjamin C. Bradlee

#american politics #bodies #clout #had #history

Is there some lesson on how to be friends? I think what it means is that central to living a life that is good is a life that's forgiving. We're creatures of contact regardless of whether we kiss or we wound. Still, we must come together. Though it may spell destruction, we still ask for more-- since it beats staying dry but so lonely on shore. So we make ourselves open while knowing full well it's essentially saying "please, come pierce my shell. ↗

— David Rakoff

#friendship #inspirational #npr #the-scorpion-and-the-tortoise #this-american-life

My last girlfriend was Greek,” said the Iceman. “The shit her family ate. You would not believe. Like rice wrapped in leaves. Shit like that. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#family