#erica

The highest possible form of treason is to say that Americans aren’t loved wherever they go, whatever they do. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#love

I wonder if she’s infatuated enough to let me lock her in a box with me on a cool fall day and make love like America depends on us. ↗

— Darnell Lamont Walker

#love #love

Would it be such a terrible thing for us to fall in love?" he asked. ... "Ask me again in the morning. ↗

— Donna Thurland

#ask #grey #kate #love #morning

What manner of men had lived in those days...who had so eagerly surrendered their sovereignty for a lie and a delusion? Why had they been so anxious to believe that the government could solve problems for them which had been pridefully solved, many times over, by their fathers? Had their characters become so weak and debased, so craven and emasculated, that offers of government dole had become more important than their liberty and their humanity? Had they not know that power delegated to the government becomes the club of tyrants? They must have known. They had their own history to remember, and the history of five thousand years. Yet, they had willingly and knowingly, with all this knowledge, declared themselves unfit to manage their own affairs and had placed their lives, which belonged to God only, in the hands of sinister men who had long plotted to enslave them, by wars, by "directives," by "emergencies." In the name of the American people, the American people had been made captive. ↗

— Taylor Caldwell

#freedom #politics #tyranny #freedom

War has been glorified by men who have never been shot at. ↗

— Bobbye L. Hudspeth

#civil-war #fiction #history #war #men

England and America owe their liberty to commerce, which created a new species of power to undermine the feudal system. But let them beware of the consequences: the tyranny of wealth is still more galling and debasing than that of rank. ↗

— Mary Wollstonecraft

#britain #england #money #power #money

Before our white brothers arrived to make us civilized men,we didn't have any kind of prison. Because of this, we had no delinquents. We had no locks nor keys and therefore among us there were no thieves. When someone was so poor that he couldn't afford a horse, a tent or a blanket, he would, in that case, receive it all as a gift. We were too uncivilized to give great importance to private property. We didn't know any kind of money and consequently, the value of a human being was not determined by his wealth. We had no written laws laid down, no lawyers, no politicians, therefore we were not able to cheat and swindle one another. We were really in bad shape before the white men arrived and I don't know how to explain how we were able to manage without these fundamental things that (so they tell us) are so necessary for a civilized society. ↗

— Lame Deer

#men

...reduction is precisely what a work of art opposes. Easy answers...annotations, arrows...an oudine of its design...very seriously mislead. ↗

— William H. Gass

#literary-criticism #the-recognitions #twentieth-century #art

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