Lately it's started to seem to me that here in America our fetishization of self-reliance has taken a wrong turn and has helped enable us to jettison compassion as a national value while still maintaining a vision of ourselves as essentially well-mea...
U.S. News Organizations observe the anniversary of September 11 with investigations about the nation’s continuing vulnerability to terrorism. First, the New York Daily News reports that two of its reporters carried box cutters, razor knives, and pe...
In my quest to find Green Cottenham, I also discovered an unsettling truth that when white Americans frankly peel back the layers of our commingled pasts, we are all marked by it. Whether a company or an individual, we are marred either by our connec...
Every woman whether rich or poor, married or single, has a circle of influence within which, according to her character, she is exerting a certain amount of power for good or harm. Every woman, by her virtue or her vice, by her folly or her wisdom, b...
Noah Vosen: Our target is a British national - Simon Ross, a reporter. I want all his phones, his BlackBerry, his apartment, his car, bank accounts, credit cards, travel patterns - I want to know what he's going to think before he does. Every dirty l...
Gotham National Bank Manager: Think you're pretty smart, huh? The guy that hired youze, he'll just do the same to you. Oh, criminals in this town used to believe in things. Honor. Respect. Look at you! What do you believe in, huh? WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE...
[During the bank heist, the bank manager produces a shotgun and starts blasting away. Bozo and Grumpy dive for cover] Gotham National Bank Manager: Do you have any idea who you're stealing from? You and your friends are dead! Grumpy: He's out, right?...
Richard M. Nixon: [awarding Forrest a U.S table tennis tournament medal in 1972] So, are you enjoying yourself in our nation's capital, son? Forrest Gump: Yes, sir. Richard M. Nixon: So where are you staying? Forrest Gump: Uh... it's called the hotel...
[first lines] Phil: Somebody asked me today, "Phil, if you could be anywhere in the world, where would you like to be?" And I said to him, "Prob'ly right here - Elko, Nevada, our nation's high at 79 today." Out in California, they're gonna have some ...
Lamar Burgess: [as he is given a revolver] Revolvers, like this one, were given to the generals at the end of the civil war by their troops. The chambers were loaded with 5 gold plated bullets to symbolize the end of the destruction and death that se...
Ellen Griswold: Stay in the car! It's hot and dangerous out here. Aunt Edna: Don't you tell me what to do, I'll do what I want! I should never have come on this trip with you, I should have taken an airplane... and he... [pointing to Clark] Aunt Edna...
Ellen Griswold: [after the bartender shoots at Clark] Clark, I don't think that was funny. A loud noise like that could damage the kids' hearing. Clark Griswald: C'mon, Ellen. It looked real. Hell - I thought it was a real gun. Didn't you think it wa...
Clark Griswald: Roy... can I call you Roy? Have you even driven cross-country? Roy Walley: Oh, hell yes. Drove the whole family to Florida. Worst two weeks I ever spent in my life. The smell from the back seat was terrible. Clark Griswald: Ooooh. Ooo...
Mike Michaelson: The show has generated enormous revenues now equivalent to the gross national product of a small country. Christof: People forget it takes the population of an entire country to keep the show running. Mike Michaelson: Since the show ...
Marty DiBergi: Do you feel that playing rock 'n' roll music keeps you a child? That is, keeps you in a state of arrested development? Derek Smalls: No. No. No. I feel it's like, it's more like going, going to a, a national park or something. And ther...
The worst illiterate is the political illiterate, he doesn’t hear, doesn’t speak, nor participates in the political events. He doesn’t know the cost of life, the price of the bean, of the fish, of the flour, of the rent, of the shoes and of the...
We need an enemy to give people hope. Someone said that patriotism is the last refuge of cowards: those without moral principles usually wrap a flag around themselves, and the bastards always talk about the purity of the race. National identity is th...
He was a thundering paradox of a man, noble and ignoble, inspiring and outrageous, arrogant and shy, the best of me and the worst of men, the most protean, most ridiculous, and most sublime. No more baffling, exasperating soldier ever wore a uniform....
When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people's, the mottos, the slo...
In contrast to what many people in Britain and the United States believe, the true figures on growth (as best one can judge from official national accounts data) show that Britain and the United States have not grown any more rapidly since 1980 than ...
There is one element in Christianity which was not borrowed from Paganism -- religious intolerance. Referring to Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism, a writer on China says: 'Between the followers of the three national religions there is not only a to...
