#rican

Americans may say they love our accents (I have been accused of sounding 'like Princess Di') but the more thoughtful ones resent and rather dislike us as a nation and people, as friends of mine have found out by being on the edge of conversations where Americans assumed no Englishmen were listening. And it is the English, specifically, who are the targets of this. Few Americans have heard of Wales. All of them have heard of Ireland and many of them think they are Irish. Scotland gets a sort of free pass, especially since Braveheart re-established the Scots' anti-English credentials among the ignorant millions who get their history off the TV. ↗

— Peter Hitchens

#americans #anti-british-sentiment #braveheart #britons #eavesdropping

Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” - Lord Henry Wotton. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#capitalism #material #money #possessions #priorities

Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns, and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and out American colleges will recede in their public importance whilst they grow richer every year. ↗

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

#college #emerson #gold #knowledge #wealth

In ways that certain of us are uncomfortable about, SNOOTs’ attitudes about contemporary usage resemble religious/political conservatives’ attitudes about contemporary culture. We combine a missionary zeal and a near-neural faith in our beliefs’ importance with a curmudgeonly hell-in-a-handbasket despair at the way English is routinely manhandled and corrupted by supposedly educated people. The Evil is all around us: boners and clunkers and solecistic howlers and bursts of voguish linguistic methane that make any SNOOT’s cheek twitch and forehead darken. A fellow SNOOT I know likes to say that listening to most people’s English feels like watching somebody use a Stradivarius to pound nails: We are the Few, the Proud, the Appalled at Everyone Else. ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#grammar #snoot #attitude

Black women have always been these vixens, these animalistic erotic women. Why can't we just be the sexy American girl next door? ↗

— Tyra Banks

#american #animalistic #been #black #door

She smashes her knuckles into winter As autumn's wind fades into black She is the saint of all the sinners, the one whose fallen through the cracks... (iViva la Gloria!) ↗

— Billie Joe Armstrong

#bja #green-day #punk #sin #viva

I think the American people are very smart in understanding our country is very trustworthy with nuclear weapons. We've had them from the beginning. But they have also been critical for keeping the world more at peace than it would have been if it hadn't been for the American nuclear umbrella. ↗

— Haley Barbour

#american #american people #been #beginning #country

The simple truth is that balding African-American men look cool when they shave their heads, whereas balding white men look like giant thumbs. ↗

— Dave Barry

#african-american #american men #giant #heads #like

Everybody knows about Pearl Harbor. The thing that really fascinated me is that through this tragedy there was this amazing American heroism. ↗

— Michael Bay

#amazing #american #everybody #fascinated #harbor

What I'm trying to do is get this message out about self-empowerment, entrepreneurial spirit and true Americanism - the way we were when we changed the world, when Edison was alone, failing his 2,000th time on the lightbulb. ↗

— Glenn Beck

#alone #americanism #changed #edison #entrepreneurial