Commercialism is the blemish on the fair face of American life. Fighting against the terrible conditions of the explorer and pione...er, our forefathers had little time to think of beauty. Hearts and heads became as hardened to the more gracious things of life as did their bodies against physical hardship. Little by little, as nature yielded before the dynamite of their wills, life began to express itself in the same hard terms, and the great commerce of a New World bent everything to its indomitable will.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
These hearings take place on the eve of Mother's Day, a ritual observance which celebrates not so much mothers and motherhood as t...he American genius for wedding sentimentality and profitable commercialism.... But Mother's Day 1970 may usher in a new era, for it comes at a time when a very strong tide is running in behalf of the proposition that American women, while they may like candy and roses, really need basic rights still denied them. Rights not roses is the watchword for an increasing number of American women ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The crude commercialism of America, its materialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of ima...gination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man who, according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie, and it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the cherry-tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »