#eric

Eduardo Galeano notes that America was conquered, but not discovered, that the men who arrived with a religion to impose and dreams of gold never really knew where they were, and that this discovery is still taking place in our time. ↗

— Rebecca Solnit

#landscape #nature #page- #dreams

America truly is the best idea for a country that anyone has ever come up with so far. Not only because we value democracy and the rights of the individual, but because we are always our own most effective voice of descent....We must never mistake disagreement between Americans on political or moral issues to be an indication of their level of patriotism. If you don't like what I say or don't agree with where I stand on certain issues, then good. I'm glad we're in America, and don't have to oppress each other over it. We're not just a nation, we're not an ethnicity. We are a dream of justice that people have had for a thousand years. ↗

— Craig Ferguson

#inspirational #patriotism #dreams

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

Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America - that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement. ↗

— Thomas Wolfe

#certain #fixed #haunting #here #movement

We are now in the Me Decade - seeing the upward roll of the third great religious wave in American history. ↗

— Tom Wolfe

#american history #decade #great #history #me

Part of what is wrong with the view of American imperialism is that it is antithetical to our interests. We are better off when people are governing themselves. I'm sure there is some guy that will tell you that philosophy is no different from the Roman Empire's. Well, it is fundamentally different. ↗

— Paul Wolfowitz

#antithetical #better #better off #different #empire

Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and comercials. ↗

— Neil Postman

#conversation #people #shallowness #talking #television

...It was one of the great livery-stableman's most masterly intuitions to have discovered that Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it. ↗

— Edith Wharton

#amusement #age

Sejal had not thought of her home, or of India as a whole, as cool. She was dimly aware, however, of a white Westerner habit of wearing other cultures like T-shirts—the sticker bindis on club kids, sindoor in the hair of an unmarried pop star, Hindi characters inked carelessly on tight tank tops and pale flesh. She knew Americans liked to flash a little Indian or Japanese or African. They were always looking for a little pepper to put in their dish. ↗

— Adam Rex

#india #multiculturalism #pop-culture #age

In America access is always about architecture and never about human beings. Among Israelis and Palestinians, access was rarely about anything but people. While in the U.S. a wheelchair stands out as an explicitly separate experience from the mainstream, in the Israel and Arab worlds it is just another thing that can go wrong in a place where things go wrong all the time. ↗

— John Hockenberry

#america #disability #israel #wheelchair #architecture