If you wanted to bestow the grandiose title of "most successful organization in modern history," you would struggle to find a more obviously worthy nominee than the federal government of the United States. In its earliest stirrings, it established a ...
Jefferson Smith: You see, boys forget what their country means by just reading The Land of the Free in history books. Then they get to be men they forget even more. Liberty's too precious a thing to be buried in books, Miss Saunders. Men should hold ...
Sheriff Al Chambers: Your detective told you he couldn't come right back because he was goin' to question Norman Bates' mother. Right? Lila Crane: Yes. Sheriff Al Chambers: Norman Bates' mother has been dead and buried in Greenlawn Cenetery for the p...
Xerxes: There will be no glory in your sacrifice. I will erase even the memory of Sparta from the histories! Every piece of Greek parchment shall be burned. Every Greek historian, and every scribe shall have their eyes pulled out, and their tongues c...
the freedom of individuals has – we may presume – an anthropological foundation. This is admittedly a doctrine which cannot be proved or disproved in the normal sense of the word ‘prove’. And yet our hope that freedom is not going to be ultim...
Like some homeopathic cure, our very sense of imprisonment can be a step toward liberation. We need not rebel against our temporally determined roles. Merely to recognize them is to limit their power over us. The liberation implied by such awareness ...
Great travel writing consists of equal parts curiosity, vulnerability and vocabulary. It is not a terrain for know-it-alls or the indecisive. The best of the genre can simply be an elegant natural history essay, a nicely writ sports piece, or a well-...
Good Samaritans: Truth, justice and the American way–for them it wasn't only a comic book code; it was a way of life. it was admirable, courageous, and inconvenient as shit. -Stefan, CHIMERA
Two generations of Americans knew more about the Ford coil than the clitoris, about the planetary system of gears that the solar system of stars.
Americans refused to see accidents as accidental. They did not comprehend they while tragedy always exacts a formidable price, it rarely incurs a debt.
The American educational psychologist Patricia Alexander has expressed the view that fear paralyses and curiosity empowers. Accordingly, she reasons, we should always be more interested than afraid.
Generally speaking, though, Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure. Ours is an entertainment-seeking nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one.
It [the Harlem Renaissance] was a time of black individualism, a time marked by a vast array of characters whose uniqueness challenged the traditional inability of white Americans to differentiate between blacks.
We Americans are interested only in the consumption of our products. We have no interest in how they are produced, or what happens to them once we discard them, once we throw them away.
He [Iggy] started reaching for things around the table, and his hand landed on Total. “You’re black.” “I prefer canine-American,” said Total.
All my life I wanted to go to bed with an American, and now I had, and I'm beginning to see why people don't do it more often.
Locals. They’ll eventually get out. They’re annoyed. Like when Americans go to the lake. And it’s closed. ‘Cause some kid pooped in the water.
I had the fleeting thought then that we are each of us pathetic in one way or another, and the trick is to marry a person whose patheticness you can tolerate.
I wanted her to have the full, long life that every parent promises his or her child by the simple act of bringing that child into the world.
Are Latino-Americans white? Black? Other? Illegal aliens from Mars? Or are we the very face of America?
A blanket could be used to stop terrorism. Unless that terrorist has a small knife, or really sharp teeth, and is able to chew through the cloth separating him from our American freedom.
