Lester Burnham: This isn't life! This is just stuff! And it's become more important to you than living!
In 1900, the typical American was a boy, not yet a teenager, named John. He lived with his parents and his sisters, Mary and Helen, on a farm in New York or Pennsylvania.
The popular notion is that Americans are addicted to fossil fuels, but I find that's not true; most people would be happy to power their lives with anything else.
Television has greater power over the lives of most Americans than any educational system, government, or church.
College graduates work in every sector of the American economy, and the research engines incubated within our universities generate a wealth of ideas and innovations that have an enormous impact on our lives.
Well, first of all, let's go right to it. We're going to balance the budget. We should live within our own means, and we should read the bills and work with the American people.
Stacey, American Dreamgirl: [points to beer bottle] What do you call that? Colin: Uh, Bottle. Stacey, American Dreamgirl, Jeannie, American Angel, Carol-Anne, American Goddess: [giggling, mimicking accent] BOHT-el! Jeannie, American Angel: [points ...
Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful c...
Republicans approve of the American farmer, but they are willing to help him go broke. They stand four-square for the American home--but not for housing. They are strong for labor--but they are stronger for restricting labor's rights. They favor mini...
The shape does not change. There was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. you may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are lik...
Nobody's busting into YOUR apartment at three in the morning, are they? Well, then don't worry about what they're doing in South Korea and places like that. It's like the standard of living. Are you content to achieve your higher standard of living a...
The colleges and other institutions of learning are going too far, in my opinion. I think 50% of those attending educational institutions, having the professions in view, would be better off with a common school education that would enable them to ea...
To say that the humanities can be a path to truth itself is to challenge one of our most closely held beliefs. We live not only in a scientific world, but also in a scientistic one: a world that thinks that science - empirical, objective, quantifiabl...
What matters is that Southern slaves, at least on the larger plantations, created their own African American culture, which helped to preserve some of the more crucial areas of life and thought from white control or domination without significantly r...
Like Solon, Plato intended to write a long fable about legendary Atlantis; like Solon, he never did write it. Yet there existed beyond the Atlantic an unvisited land, after all, and it is more strange than any of Plato's myths that Plato's apprehensi...
Woodrow Wilson has just made the decision to take part in World War I. What was he feeling then? Did he know the possible outcomes of his decision? Did he feel the burden of American lives on his shoulders? He probably said something like: "Goddamn. ...
Should a writer have a social purpose? Any honest writer is bound to become a critic of the society he lives in, and sometimes, like Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut or Leo Tolstoy or Francois Rabelais, a very harsh critic indeed. The others are sycophant...
Pu Yi, at 15: Who is this George Washington? Reginald Fleming 'R.J.' Johnston: A famous American, your majesty. A revolutionary general, the first American president. Pu Yi, at 15: Ah, like Mr. Lenin in Russia? Reginald Fleming 'R.J.' Johnston: Not q...
But really, it was reading that led me to writing. And in particular, reading the American classics like Twain who taught me at an early age that ordinary lives of ordinary people can be made into high art.
I think Americans are weirdly puritanistic about psychopharmaceuticals. There are millions of people out there who would otherwise be dead or rocking by themselves in a corner who now lead full and normal lives because of amazing and wonderful scient...
France, and the whole of Europe have a great culture and an amazing history. Most important thing though is that people there know how to live! In America they've forgotten all about it. I'm afraid that the American culture is a disaster.
