#rican

George, I know you’re tired. But President Lincoln, he didn’t free us to be lazy and no good. He freed us to work hard and improve ourselves.”-George’s Grandmother. ↗

— George Dawson

#slavery #life

...that in spite of living in a mansion an American is not above wearing a pair of secondhand pants, bought for fifty cents. ↗

— Jhumpa Lahiri

#american #jhumpa-lahiri #life #money #the-namesake

The earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites one family. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. The earth is sacred and men and animals are but one part of it. Treat the earth with respect so that it lasts for centuries to come and is a place of wonder and beauty for our children. ↗

— Extract from Chief Seattle.

#earth #man #native-american #nature #beauty

But they're already singing our praises!" "They are Americans. They toot their horns for anything. ↗

— Scott Westerfeld

#enthusiasm #humor #humor

American long for a closed society in which everything can be bought, where laborers are either hidden away or dressed up as nonhumans, so as not to be disconcerting. This place is called Disney World ↗

— Adam Gopnik

#disney-world #humor #humor

What are American dry-goods? asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb. American novels, answered Lord Henry. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#bad-reviews #books #humor #literary-criticism #novels

Most people were heartless about turtles because a turtle’s heart will beat for hours after it has been cut up and butchered. But the old man thought, I have such a heart too. ↗

— Ernest Hemingway

#hemingway #literature

You know Americans...Self-improvement. No matter who or what we are, we're always working on ways to become somebody else. ↗

— Alan Brown

#americans #audrey-hepburn #improvement #japan #japanese

My Japanese isn’t much better today, but at least now I appreciate my duality more than when I was a punk kid. ↗

— Gil Asakawa

#japan #japanese-american #language #japan

My quarrel with Chomsky goes back to the Balkan wars of the 1990s, where he more or less openly represented the "Serbian Socialist Party" (actually the national-socialist and expansionist dictatorship of Slobodan Milosevic) as the victim. Many of us are proud of having helped organize to prevent the slaughter and deportation of Europe's oldest and largest and most tolerant Muslim minority, in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in Kosovo. But at that time, when they were real, Chomsky wasn't apparently interested in Muslim grievances. He only became a voice for that when the Taliban and Al Qaeda needed to be represented in their turn as the victims of a "silent genocide" in Afghanistan. Let me put it like this, if a supposed scholar takes the Christian-Orthodox side when it is the aggressor, and then switches to taking the "Muslim" side when Muslims commit mass murder, I think that there is something very nasty going on. And yes, I don't think it is exaggerated to describe that nastiness as "anti-American" when the power that stops and punishes both aggressions is the United States. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#antiwar-movement #bosnian-war #leftism #noam-chomsky #dictatorship