#erica

If you want to understand a society, take a good look at the drugs it uses. And what can this tell you about American culture? Well, look at the drugs we use. Except for pharmaceutical poison, there are essentially only two drugs that Western civilization tolerates: Caffeine from Monday to Friday to energize you enough to make you a productive member of society, and alcohol from Friday to Monday to keep you too stupid to figure out the prison that you are living in. ↗

— Bill Hicks

#america #drugs #society

And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles. So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#books #politics #love

Why did the Articles [of Confederation] fail so completely? Most historians believe the founding fathers spent a great deal of their first constitutional convention drafting the delaration of independence and only realized on July 3rd the Articles were also due. ↗

— Jon Stewart

#confederation #constitution #failure #independence

So the American government lied to the Native Americans for many, many years, and then President Clinton lied about a relationship, and everyone was surprised! A little naïve, I feel! ↗

— Eddie Izzard

#bill-clinton #clinton #lying #native-americans #president

It will take time to restore chaos ↗

— George W. Bush

#bush #george-bush #idiot #president #president

I'm a bit retarded, like most Americans. ↗

— Henry Miller

#cancer

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