Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half have never voted for president. One hopes it is the same half. —Gore Vidal More about this quote Tags: education knowledge USA Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependence and back into bondage. —Fraser Tyler More about this quote Tags: history apathy progress nations world faith liberty courage wealth slavery abundance Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
Don Quixote is the true American. . . . You do not have to look in many American eyes to suddenly meet somewhere the beautiful grave lunacy of his gaze. —Tennessee Williams More about this quote Tags: dreams America Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
Every American carries in his bloodstream the heritage of the malcontent and the dreamer. —Dorothy Fuldheim More about this quote Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
Sir, [the American colonists] are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging. —Samuel Johnson More about this quote Tags: crime colonialism convicts Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
Americans are very friendly and very suspicious, that is what Americans are and that is what always upsets the foreigner who deals with them, they are so friendly how can they be so suspicious they are so suspicious how can they be so friendly but they just are. —Gertrude Stein More about this quote Tags: americans suspicion friendliness foreigners Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
They gave him a seashell: "So you'll learn to love the water." They opened a cage and let a bird go free: "So you'll learn to love the air." They gave him a geranium: "So you'll learn to love the earth." And they gave him a little bottle sealed up tight. "Don't ever, ever open it. So you'll learn to love mystery. —Eduardo Galeano More about this quote Tags: love learning mystery earth water air Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
There is no reason to repeat bad history. —Eleanor Holmes Norton More about this quote Tags: history bad reason repetition memort Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
Our noses too, and our eyes and ears, are political instruments, protesters. An aesthetic response is a political action. . . . We know instinctively, aesthetically, when a fish stinks, when the sense of beauty is offended. Standing for these moments — and these moments occur each day, within every airless office building, seated in each crippling chair, inundated by senseless noise and fattened on industrial food — standing for our responses, these aesthetic reverberations of truth in the soul, may be the primary civic act of the citizen, the origin of caution and of the precautionary principle itself, with its warnings to stop, look, and listen. —James Hillman More about this quote Tags: truth politics action food control caution Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
We must always be on the lookout for perverse dynamic processes which carry even good things to excess. It is precisely these excesses which become the most evil things in the world. The devil, after all, is a fallen angel. —Kenneth Boulding More about this quote Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
The culture has moved to the point where I find myself in the far left without having gone there. I still feel like I'm putting up my father's old Indiana farmer's values. I think I'm a conservative. I don't think these guys that call themselves "conservatives" really are; these guys are high rollers and plungers and bet-the-farm-on-slender-odds guys; they ain't conservatives. I think a conservative is somebody who cares about conserving the planet and the air and the water and the sky and the sun. It is something mean to say that mankind has fucked up the sunshine. —Stephen Gaskin More about this quote Tags: politics conservation culture conservative sunshine Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
Condoms aren't completely safe. A friend of mine was wearing one and got hit by a bus. —Bob Rubin More about this quote Tags: risk sex condoms Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
Look twice before you leap. —Charlotte Bronte More about this quote Tags: attention risk certainty looking Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
We are impressed with nature's power, but by projecting upon this power an image of the feminine, the mother, we reassure ourselves — for surely a mother will always be loving toward us, continue to feed us, clothe us, and carry away our wastes, and never kill us, no matter how much toxic waste we put in the soil or how many CFCs in the ozone. The sense of nature as inexhaustible mother encourages us to feel there are no limits to a finite planet, while the sense of nature as benign and ever-loving mother permits us to continue disregarding a crescendo of warnings. —Elizabeth Dodson Gray More about this quote Tags: power danger nature environmentalism mother feminine Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
She said there were two people you had to be true to — those people who came before you and those people who came after you. —Gayl Jones More about this quote Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email