The American ideal ... of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This idea has created cowboys and I...ndians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white. It is an ideal so paralytically infantile that it is virtually forbidden--as an unpatriotic act--that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, i...nvesting and prospering in the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger a...nd are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
European society has always been divided into classes in a way that American society never has been. A European writer considers h...imself to be part of an old and honorable tradition--of intellectual activity, of letters--and his choice of a vocation does not cause him any uneasy wonder as to whether or not it will cost him all his friends. But this tradition does not exist in America.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was the feeling of a passenger on an ocean steamer whose mind will not give him rest until he has been in the engine-room and t...alked with the engineer. She wanted to see with her own eyes the action of primary forces; to touch with her own eyes the action of primary forces; to touch with her own hand the massive machinery of society; to measure with her own mind the capacity of the motive power. She was bent upon getting to the heart of the great American mystery of democracy and government.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If American has points of inferiority to English, they are merely matters of degree; if the Americans are, as Oliver Wendell Holme...s said in 1858, "the Romans of the modern world--the great assimilating people," the English are only to an exceedingly limited degree its Greeks. They are tarred too much with the same brush of pragmatism, democracy, industrialism, and materialism for deep cleavage. Even America is not wholly democratic culturally; there are remarkable enclaves of aristocratic culture in the cosmopolitan and tradition-bound society of the Eastern seaboard, whose members look east toward Europe far more than they look west towards the heartland of Americanism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am convinced that our American society will become more and more vulgarized and that it will be fragmentized into contending eco...nomic, racial and religious pressure groups lacking in unity and common will, unless we can arrest the disintegration of the family and of community solidarity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We must give Mr. Phillips the credit of being a clean, erect, and what was once called a consistent man. He at least is not respon...sible for slavery, nor for American Independence; for the hypocrisy and superstition of the Church, nor the timidity and selfishness of the State; nor for the indifference and willing ignorance of any. He stands so distinctly, so firmly, and so effectively alone, and one honest man is so much more than a host, that we cannot but feel that he does himself injustice when he reminds us of "the American Society, which he represents."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I'm always amazed at the American practice of allowing one party to a homosexual act to remain passive--it's so undemocratic. Sex ...must be mutual.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What a prodigious growth this English race, especially the American branch of it, is having! How soon will it subdue and occupy al...l the wild parts of this continent and of the islands adjacent. No prophecy, however seemingly extravagant, as to future achievements in this way [is] likely to equal the reality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »