#erica

The world knows that America will never start a war. This generation of Americans has had enough of war and hate... we want to build a world of peace where the weak are secure and the strong are just. ↗

— John F. Kennedy

#build #enough #generation #had #had enough

And this fear that US models are replacing everything else now spills over from the sphere of culture into our two remaining categories: for this process is clearly, at one level, the result of economic domination - of local cultural industries closed down by American rivals. ↗

— Fredric Jameson

#categories #clearly #closed #cultural #culture

It is the genius of our Constitution that under its shelter of enduring institutions and rooted principles there is ample room for the rich fertility of American political invention. ↗

— Lyndon B. Johnson

#ample #constitution #enduring #fertility #genius

Gordie, the white boy genius, gave me this book by a Russian dude named Tolstoy, who wrote, 'Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' Well, I hate to argue with a Russian genius, but Tolstoy didn't know Indians, and he didn't know that all Indian families are unhappy for the same exact reasons: the frikkin' booze. ↗

— Sherman Alexie

#american-indians #humor #tolstoy #family

I want to hold a series of meetings all over the country and get the facts before the American people. ↗

— Mary Harris Jones

#american people #before #country #facts #get

There is a strange emptiness to life without myths. I am African American — by which I mean, a descendant of slaves, rather than a descendant of immigrants who came here willingly and with lives more or less intact. My ancestors were the unwilling, unintact ones: children torn from parents, parents torn from elders, people torn from roots, stories torn from language. Past a certain point, my family’s history just… stops. As if there was nothing there. I could do what others have done, and attempt to reconstruct this lost past. I could research genealogy and genetics, search for the traces of myself in moldering old sale documents and scanned images on microfiche. I could also do what members of other cultures lacking myths have done: steal. A little BS about Atlantis here, some appropriation of other cultures’ intellectual property there, and bam! Instant historically-justified superiority. Worked great for the Nazis, new and old. Even today, white people in my neck of the woods call themselves “Caucasian”, most of them little realizing that the term and its history are as constructed as anything sold in the fantasy section of a bookstore. These are proven strategies, but I have no interest in them. They’ll tell me where I came from, but not what I really want to know: where I’m going. To figure that out, I make shit up. ↗

— N.K. Jemisin

#constructs #making-stuff-up #myth #personal-history #family

I've always been crazy for the American songbook. ↗

— Ashley Judd

#american #been #crazy #i #songbook

The older painting - well, it does have an effect all at once, I suppose, but it's of a lesser intensity than a lot of the American work in the last ten or fifteen years. ↗

— Donald Judd

#does #effect #fifteen #i #intensity

Health care for all Americans is the most pressing domestic issue today. It's far past time for the President and Congress to deliver health care to everyone. ↗

— Russ Feingold

#care #congress #deliver #domestic #everyone

Winning is great, but being able to finish my last Olympic Games on American soil was very important. Even though I was injured, I didn't let my psyche get the best of me and cause me to doubt myself, so I was willing to pull every muscle in my body in '96 in order to get the job done and I came away with the bronze medal. ↗

— Jackie Joyner-Kersee

#american #away #being #best #body