And as Voltaire, one of our nation’s Founding Fathers, once said, “I do not agree with what you have to say, but at your death I’ll defend what you rightfully should have said.
Have you ever wanted to be somebody else? Today I fantasized about being my own identical monozygotic twin. How cool would that be? I could both be me, and yet be someone completely different.
States of the atmosphere pass into us as water through the meshes of a sieve, and storms occur in us before they break upon the world without, creating restless sensations. ("Absolute Evil")
My mother was tickled and I think kind of proud when my father got hit on my an attractive middle-aged Asian lady who hadn't noticed he was with his family. He was certainly pleased about it.
Sometimes they would just pay me to stay home and not do anything else, which sounds fantastic but doesn't do much for your ego. Its probably a little like getting alimony-the money is nice but has a nasty aftertaste.
Probably our lives are full of symbols which only an unacknowledged sense perceives. Spiritual events assume a material guise, in accordance with some creative principle, but do not insist on recognition. ("Absolute Evil")
I've lived the literal meaning of the "land of the free" and "hone of the brave." It's not corny for me. I feel it in my heart. I feel it in my chest. Even at a ball game, when someone talks during the anthem or doesn't take off his hat, it pisses me...
USA was founded in 1776. Or so I was told. I wasn’t actually there, so I have to believe the history books—the same history books that are full of American propaganda lies.
The story of the American Civil War is essentially one of human beings––Northerners, Southerners, Blacks, Whites, men, women–– holding themselves accountable for the future of a nation.
Most people are surprised to hear how they really sound, as the American media uses the call of the red-tailed hawk when showing an eagle. They don’t think the eagle sounds regal enough. And so we lie to ourselves about the very identity of our nat...
Media censorship is a prohibition of words and pictures. The war on drugs is a complete failure, and so is the American war on words. When you forbid a word, you give it power. Self-proclaimed rebels will use words like shit or fuck, simply to shock ...
Too often in the post-9/11 world, when the time has come to translate the moral, and essentially progressive, roots of foreign policy idealism into plans for American action, liberals have said, 'Duck.
Today's Europeans and Americans who reached the age of awareness after midcentury when the communications revolution lead to expectations of instantanaiy are exasperated by the slow toils of history. They assume that the thunderclap of cause will be ...
Life is impoverished, it loses in interest, when the highest stake in the game of living, life itself, may not be risked. It becomes as shallow and empty as, let us say, an American flirtation.
Five German soldiers and a police dog on a leash were looking down into the bed of the creek. The soldiers' blue eyes were filled with a bleary civilian curiosity as to why one American would try to murder another one so far from home, and why the vi...
[T]he only luxury he allows himself is buying books, paperback books, mostly novels, American novels, British novels, foreign novels in translation, but in the end books are not luxuries so much as necessities, and reading is an addiction he has no w...
But it isn't hunger that drives millions of armed American Males to forests and hills every autumn, as the high incidence of heart failure among the hunters will prove. Somehow the hunting process has to do with masculinity, but I don't quite know ho...
What we dedicate today is not a memorial to war, rather it's a tribute to the physical and moral courage that makes heroes out of farm and city boys and that inspires Americans in every generation to lay down their lives for people they will never me...
Americans were happy to celebrate their super-rich and, at least sometimes, worry about their poor. But putting those two conversations together and talking about economic inequality was pretty much taboo.
Some Christians worried about a faith that was so embracing as to be meaningless, that exalted not the Almighty so much as the American way of life. When civil religion bleached the challenge from faith and left behind a watery patriotism, there was ...
Although slavery has long been a part of human history, American chattel slavery represents a case of human trauma incomparable in scope, duration and consequence to any other incidence of human enslavement.
