...I am an outsider, a lesbian, a shikse. The Jewish community is not my community. But as a Jew--as a Jew in a Christian, anti-Se...mitic society--the Jewish community is, and will always remain, my community. Enemy and ally.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Japan gets the most of ordinary people by organizing them to adapt and succeed. America, by getting out of their way so that they ...can adjust individually, allows them to succeed. It is not that Japan has no individualists and America no organizations, but the thrusts of the societies are different. Japan has distorted its economy and depressed its living standard in order to keep its job structure and social values as steady as possible. At the government's direction, the entire economy has tried to flex almost as one, in response to the ever-changing world. The country often seems like a family that becomes more tightly bound together when it must withstand war, emigration, or some other upheaval. America's strength is the opposite: it opens its doors and brings the world's disorder in. It tolerates social change that would tear most other countries apart. The openness encourages Americans to adapt as individuals rather than as a group.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And you, America, that passion made you. You were not born to prosperity, you were born to love freedom.... You did not say "en masse," you said "independence." But we cannot have all the luxuries and freedom also.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The peace loving nations must make a concerted effort in opposition to those violations of treaties and those ignorings of humane ...instincts which today are creating a state of international anarchy and instability from which there is no escape through mere isolation or neutrality.... When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of the disease.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I recalled when I worked in the woods and the bars of Madras, Oregon.... That short-haired joy and roughness-- America--your stupidity. I could almost love you again.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Everywhere--all over Africa and South America ... you see these suburbs springing up. They represent the optimum of what people wa...nt. There's a certain sort of logic leading towards these immaculate suburbs. And they're terrifying, because they are the death of the soul.... This is the prison this planet is being turned into.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Theater people are always pining and agonizing because they're afraid that they'll be forgotten. And in America they're quite righ...t. They will be.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Let a man attain the highest and broadest culture that any American has possessed, then let him die by sea-storm, railroad collisi...on, or other accident, and all America will acquiesce that the best thing has happened to him; that, after the education has gone far, such is the expensiveness of America, that the best use to put a fine person to is to drown him to save his board.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In Europe life is histrionic and dramatized, and ... in America, except when it is trying to be European, it is direct and sincere....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »