America fears the unshaven legs, the unshaven men's cheeks, the aroma of perspiration, and the limp prick. Above all it fears the ...limp prick.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms. Everybody is fairly decent, respectable, domestic, b...ourgeois, middle-class, and tiresome. There is absolutely nothing to revile except that it's a bore.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The American mind exasperated the European as a buzz-saw might exasperate a pine-forest. The English mind disliked the French mind... because it was antagonistic, unreasonable, perhaps hostile, but recognized it as at least a thought. The American mind was not a thought at all; it was a convention, superficial, narrow, and ignorant; a mere cutting instrument, practical, economical, sharp and direct. The English themselves hardly conceived that their mind was either economical, sharp or direct; but the defect that most struck an American was its enormous waste in eccentricity. Americans needed and used their whole energy, and applied it with close economy; but English society was eccentric by law and for sake of the eccentricity itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence, f...or the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.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 »
The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fanta...sies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it domina...tes the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Deep down, the US, with its space, its technological refinement, its bluff good conscience, even in those spaces which it opens up... for simulation, is the only remaining primitive society.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »