#erica

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 love America and I hate it. I'm torn between the two. I have two conflicting visions of America. One is a kind of dream landscape and the other is a kind of black comedy. ↗

— Bono

#bono #dreams

Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists. ↗

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

#history #immigration #politics #revolution #united-states

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

the greatest Americans have not been born yet they are waiting patiently for the past to die ↗

— Saul Williams

#americans #insightful #insight

All around us were people I had spent ten years avoiding--shapeless women in wool bathing suits, dull-eyed men with hairless legs and self-conscious laughs, all Americans, all fearsomely alike. These people should be kept at home, I thought; lock them in the basement of some goddamn Elks Club and keep them pacified with erotic movies; if they want a vacation, show them a foreign art film; and if they still aren't satisfied, send them into the wilderness and run them with vicious dogs. ↗

— Hunter S. Thompson

#americans #existential #people #art

God created war so that Americans would learn geography. ↗

— Mark Twain

#geography #war #learn

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people. ↗

— John F. Kennedy

#alien #american #american people #competitive #entrust