#erica

I had very supportive parents that made the way for me, even at a time when there were very few women - no women, really; maybe two or three women - and very few, fewer than that, African-American women heading in this direction, so there were very few people to look up to. You just had to have faith. ↗

— Leah Ward Sears

#african-american women #american women #direction #even #faith

I had been an eyewitness to a truly historic moment in American pop culture. ↗

— Jean Shepherd

#been #culture #had #historic #i

I made a gym, it's the best gym in Nicaragua, I have kids that this year July 6th through the 11th will be fighting and then will go on to the Central American Games and I'm sure at least one will win a gold medal. ↗

— Alexis Arguello

#best #central #fighting #games #go

American Pie speaks to the loss that we feel. That's why that song has found the niche that it has. ↗

— Don McLean

#american pie #feel #found #loss #niche

The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colours breaking through. ↗

— Alexis de Tocqueville

#american society #aristocratic #breaking #colours #covered

It should surprise no one that modern soldiers return home just as conflicted and detached as previous generations. The difference is that in the age of vapid American decadence, their simpler fundamental values are largely irrelevant to we civilians. ↗

— Tiffany Madison

#combat #values-in-life #war #warriors #age

The Americans of the age were not an irreligious people; and the fact that they were Christian was very important, for the marks of Christianity lay all across the Constitution. ↗

— Theodore H. White

#christianity #u-s-constitution #age

But in a society with no central motivation, so far adrift and puzzled with itself that its President feels called upon to appoint a Committee on National Goals, a sense of alienation is likely to be very popular--especially among people young enough to shrug off the guilt they're suppose to feel for deviating from a goal or purpose they never understood in the first place. Let the old people wallow in the shame of having failed. The laws they made to preserve a myth are no longer pertinent; the so called American Way begins to seem like a dike made of cheap cement, with many more leaks than the law has fingers to plug. America has been breeding mass anomie since the end of World War II. It is not a political thing, but the sense of new realities, or urgency, anger and sometimes desperation in a society where even the highest authorities seem to be grasping at straws. ↗

— Hunter S. Thompson

#anger

I like it too," Angelo said. "I love this country. Much you and anybody, and you know it." "I know it," Prew said. "But I still hate this country. You love the Army. But I dont love the Army. This country's Army is why I hate this country. What did this country ever do for me? Gimme a right to vote for men I cant elect? You can have it. Gimme a right to work at a job I hate? You can have that too. Then tell I'm a Citizen of the greatest richest country on earth, if I dont believe it look at Park Avenue. Carnival prizes. All carnival prizes. [..] They shouldnt teach their immigrants' kids all about democracy unless they mean to let them have a little bit of it, it ony makes for trouble. Me and the United States is dissociating our alliance as of right now, until the United States can find time to read its own textbooks a little." Prew thought, a little sickly, of the little book, The Man Without A Country that his mother used to read to him so often, and how the stern patriotic judge condemned the man to live on a warship where no one could ever mention home to him the rest of his whole life, and how he had always felt that pinpoint of pleased righteous anger at seeing the traitor get what he deserved. ↗

— James Jones

#democracy #immigrants #patriotism #propaganda #the-american-dream

Everybody has their own America, and then they have pieces of a fantasy America that they think is out there but they can’t see…So the fantasy corners of America…you’ve pieced them together from scenes in movies and music and lines from books. And you live in your dream America that you’ve custom-made from art and schmaltz and emotions just as much as you live in your real one. ↗

— Andy Warhol

#art