American Culture Quotes

“Owning land is like owning the ocean, or the air. no one owns land.”
― Tamanend

“We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are. Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all — by proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians — be participating in its destruction? Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us.

How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.”
― Wendell Berry

“American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.”
― H. L. Mencken

“We have become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.”
― Jimmy Carter

“[N]ow that I am drawing to the close of this work, in which I have spoken of so many important things done by the Americans, to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: To the superiority of their women.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

“Every white person in this country-and I do not care what he or she says-knows one thing. They may not know, as they put, "what I want",but they know they would not like to be black here.
If they know that, then they know everything they need to know, and whatever else they say is a lie.”
― James Baldwin, The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings

“Their constant outward-looking, their mania for radios, cars, and a thousand other trinkets made them dream and fix their eyes upon the trash of life, made it impossible for them to learn a language which could have taught them to speak of what was in their or others' hearts. The words of their souls were the syllables of popular songs.”
― Richard Wright, Black Boy

“Alice is fictional. This isn't.”
― Jess C. Scott, Zombie Mania: A Zombie Apocalypse Parody

“A woman today who has no goal, no purpose, no ambition patterning her days into the future, making her stretch and grow beyond that small score of years in which her body can fill its biological function, is committing a kind of suicide.”
― Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

“There is something less than fully human in those who have never known a commitment to an idea, who have never risked an exploration of the unknown, who have never attempted the kind of creativity of which men and women are potentially capable.”
― Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

“There is hardly any political question in the United States that sooner or later does not turn into a judicial question. From that, the obligation that the parties find in their daily polemics to borrow ideas and language from the judicial system. Since most public men are or have formerly been jurists, they make the habits and the turn of ideas that belong to jurists pass into the handling of public affairs. The jury ends up by familiarizing all classes with them. Thus, judicial language becomes, in a way, the common language; so the spirit of the jurist, born inside the schools and courtrooms, spreads little by little beyond their confines; it infiltrates all of society, so to speak; it descends to the lowest ranks, and the entire people finishes by acquiring a part of the habits and tastes of the magistrate.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

“The term [Americanization] invokes the transformation of the landscape into unnatural mechanical shapes, of night into day, of speed for its own sake, an irrational passion for novelty at the expense of quality, a worship of gimmickry.”
― Robert Stone

“What sort of place lets you drive and vote and fuck before it lets you drink a beer?” ~Mark Cooper”
― Lisa Henry, Mark Cooper versus America

“In America, people with pre-existing mental health issues have access to firearms but not healthcare. Thanks, Republicans!”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, Inside The Mind of an Introvert: Comics, Deep Thoughts and Quotable Quotes

“I sometimes wonder whether our churches--living as we do in American death-denying culture, relentlessly smiling through our praise choruses--are inadvertently helping people live not as much in hope as in denial.”
― Mark Galli

“Pop culture. Nobody does bullshit better than us. Right? China took over manufacturing. And the Middle East has us on fossil fuels. That's just geography and politics. We're a nation of whacko immigrants. Scavengers and con men. We crossed the ocean on faith, stole some land and stone-cold made up a whole country out of nothing but balls and bullshit. Superhero comics got invented by crazy genius Jews who showed up and revamped the refugee experience into a Man of Steel sent from Krypton with a secret identity.”
― Damon Suede, Bad Idea

“Let us honestly state the facts. Our America has a bad name for superficialness. Great men, great nations have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“As Wade Clark Roof noted in his study, "the 'weightlessness' of contemporary belief in God is a reality...for religious liberals and many evangelicals.”
― Mark Galli

“Instead of seeing America, he'd only seen dirty highways full of big stupid pickup trucks, passenger cars driven by nose-picking morons, and an endless string of repulsive fast-food joints.”
― Cinzi Lavin, The Taciturn Sky

“Indeed, this is the only case in which the Leftists can be properly identified as liberals: where they seek to “liberate” the people from virtue, reality, personal responsibility, and truth.”
― J M Rock, Death by Socialism

“Only a wise, prudent, practical and just people who are spiritually evolved can be trusted to govern themselves in alignment with moral values.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr., The Pursuit of Happiness: A Book of Poems Honoring Our American Values

“Why would a semi-nude woman walking down the street — and the society around her — have a problem with a woman wearing a hijab? Because, deep down, both she and society are aware: silently, countless eyes are undressing her, treating her as a sexual object, looking at her as a showpiece of sex. It's not just about religion. It's a matter of an inferiority complex — something that, somewhere deep inside, feels like a quiet shame imposed on her dignity by her own choice of clothing and fashion. And so, for the sake of self-satisfaction, they want to snatch the hijab from another woman — a woman who chose the hijab just as another chooses semi-nude fashion. The woman in hijab pays the price for refusing to participate in the shame society and fashion tries to impose on her.”
― Mohammed Zaki Ansari, "Zaki's Gift Of Love"

“The great and present danger to American literature is the growing homogeneity of our writers, especially the younger generation. Often raised in several places in no specific cultural or religious community, educated with no deep connection to a particular region, history, or tradition, and now employed mostly in academia, the American writer is becoming as standardized as the American car—functional, streamlined, and increasingly interchangeable.”
― Dana Gioia, The Catholic Writer Today: And Other Essays

“America"
Loans
Interest rates
Endless advertisements
Usury and deception
Countless heavy bodies filled with fear
Migrant, refugee, and illegal bodies
that came escaping America’s oppression in their own countries…
America
Depression, anxiety, and pain relief pills
A political, media, and institutional matrix of power
ran by one lobby…
Credit cards
Bankruptcy
Debts
Drugs
The homeless
Racism
Weapons
Strict security measures
Suffocating any attempt for any meaningful change
under the pretext of the homeland security…
America
Sanctions imposed on this country and that,
Internal psychological sanctions imposed
on a majority of the naïve who believe themselves to be free…
America
Tasteless fruit, vegetables, meats, eggs, and cheeses,
injected with hormones, sprayed with pesticides
and many other carcinogenic substances…
America
Houses that look beautiful from the outside,
inhabited by people who are mostly
lonely, going through psychological or nervous breakdowns,
or perhaps wrestling with depression or hysteria,
the luckiest of them are on daily pills to help them
adapt to the psychological and spiritual death
surrounding them from all sides…
America
Fruitless trees and scentless flowers,
as if as a punishment or a curse from heaven
upon those who stole the land from its native people,
after erasing most of them…
America
Bills
Sad letters in the mail,
mostly from companies and advertisers
wishing you a delightful day and great consumption,
encouraging you to solve your problems with more consumption,
and reminding you that you may die abruptly
of loneliness or the toxins that you consume,
and therefore, you must seriously consider
purchasing your casket and the plot
under which you will be buried…

[Original poem published in Arabic on August 27, 2024 at ahewar.org]”
― Louis Yako

“Being an expat can complicate your feelings about being American. We tend to possess an assumed superiority that I only noticed when it was punctured. I was also jarred by the commercialism that could engulf anything in the United States. Everything from a McDonald's Happy Meal to a spider exhibit at New York's Museum of Natural History was a marketing opportunity for the latest Hollywood blockbuster. I was overwhelmed by the simple act of walking into a grocery store, blinking under the bright fluorescent lights, and staring at the massive, overstocked aisles.”
― Alan Paul, Big in China: My Unlikely Adventures Raising a Family, Playing the Blues, and Becoming a Star in Beijing

“America was founded on a history of deception, exploitation, and appropriation. Eventually, the layers of that reality will be uncovered, revealing the truth. And much like peeling an onion, such revelations are bound to bring tears.”
― Carlos Wallace, Why Sell Lies When The Truth Is Free

“The expectation of justice is not a privilege with which I had been raised, and staring at the piece of paper, it occurs to me how black and white I have made my entire life out to be. I was going to get my justice; it was rightfully mine. How American of me.”
― Anna Qu, Made in China: A Memoir of Love and Labor

“I used to think that the great American themes--the binaries--were Success and Failure. Now I think that, more deeply, the themes are Innocence and Guilt.”
― Lance Morrow, The Noise of Typewriters: Remembering Journalism

“While Europe appears to maintain more reticence embracing it, in America there is no question that work can only be discussed as a secular sacrament, with all the indignity one might expect from such a degrading genus. The Protestant qualifier to Protestant work ethic long ago dissipated, leaving the peculiarly American artifact of viewing one’s wages as a moral reward, one’s continuous employment as a state of grace and one’s retirement as an earthly paradise merited by one’s good works.”
― J. Phillip Johnson, The Invention of Work

“Fascism is violent nationalism.

In America, fascism is called Americanism.”
― Oliver Markus malloy, American Fascism: A German Writer's Urgent Warning To America