35 Quotes About American Culture

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

Woman's sexual problems are, in this sense, by-products of the suppression of her basic need to grow and fulfill her potentialities as a human being, potentialities which the mystique of feminine fulfillment ignores. Betty Friedan

I was so tired of his being even-keeled in the face of all that was upsetting and ugly and illogical. Unknown

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

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

We are not ‘censored’ in the traditional way in the United States: writers are not beaten or killed because of their words, and no Ministry of Truth enforces an official version of what can be printed and thought. But in this culture of images, we are censoring ourselves. That may be more insidious and long-lasting. What I mean is that we disparage long-term complexity, and extol superficiality. We ignore reading, and lavish time on images. To read, in my mind, is to consider and to think. To see an image is to react. What happens when we start believing the world and what is important in it are only these reactions and prejudices? What have you become when the most expected of you is simply to press a ‘Like’ button? What kind of gulag is it when its inhabitants are too stupid to understand they are its prisoners? . Sergio Troncoso

When the media is controlled by people who runs the world, you are only going to get news that they want you to know. They will paint anther's man country's hero a tyrant, a dictator or a murderer and favor the next just to divide and conquer the people. Henry Johnson Jr

[Traveling] makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as they do in Europe. You would think the millions of people who come to Williamsburg every year would say to each other, "Gosh, Bobbi, this place is beautiful. Let's go home to Smellville and plant lots of trees and preserve all the fine old buildings." But in fact that never occurs to them. They just go back and build more parking lots and Pizza Huts. . Bill Bryson

Christianity now is in crisis, and a large part because people have marketed it as a religion of good people getting better, when in fact it is religion a bad people coping with their failure to be good. William McDavid

People want to feel good, be entertained, eat salty shit, and cum twice a week, and provided they do they'll stay quiet. Rick Remender

A nation lives by its myths and heroes. Many societies have survived defeat and invasion, even political and economic collapse. None has survived the corruption of its picture of itself. High and popular art are not in competition here. Both may help citizens decide what they are and what they admire. In our age, however, high art has given up speaking to the body of its fellow citizens. It devotes itself to technical displays that can appeal only to other technicians. . E. Christian Kopff

The only crime is pride. Sophocles

What gets me about the United States is that it pretends to be honest and therefore has so little room to move toward hope. Audre Lorde

Home is what we know we ought to want but can't really take. America is not so much a home for anyone as a universal dream of home, a wish whose attraction depends upon its remaining at the level of a wish. The movies bring the boys back but stop as soon as they get them back; for home, that vaunted, all- American ideal, is a sort of death, and an oblique justification for all the wandering that kept you away from it for so long. Michael Wood

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

That's what you do in America: you smile at people you don't know and you smile at people you don't even like and you smile for no reason. NoViolet Bulawayo

I was once in San Francisco, and I parked in the only available space, which happened to be on the other side of the street. The law descended on me. Was I aware of how dangerous the manoeuvre I’d just made was? I looked at the law a bit blankly. What had I done wrong? I had, said the law, parked against the flow of traffic. Puzzled, I looked up and down the street. What traffic? I asked. The traffic that would be there, said the law, if there was any traffic. This was a bit metaphysical, even for me, so I explained, a bit lamely, that in England we just park wherever we can find a parking space available, and weren’t that fussy about which side of the street it was on. He looked at me aghast, as if I was lucky to have got out of a country of such wild and crazy car parkers alive, and promptly gave me a ticket. Clearly he would rather have deported me before my subversive ideas brought chaos and anarchy to streets that normally had to cope with nothing more alarming than a few simple assault rifles. Which, as we know, in the States are perfectly legal, and without which they would be overrun by herds of deer, overbearing government officers, and lawless British tea importers. Douglas Adams

In America, the materio-economic conditions relate to a societal, multi-group existence in a way never before know in world history. American Negro nationalism can never create its own values, find its revolutionary significance, define its political and economic goals, until Negro intellectuals take up the cudgels against the cultural imperialism practiced in all of its manifold ramifications on the Negro within American culture. But this kind of revolution would have to be predicated on the recognition that the cultural and artistic originality of the American nation is founded, historically, on the ingredients of a black aesthetic and artistic base. Harold Cruse

I, too, like yourself was a good party man: my party was that of the Church; I was ultramontane. Your party system is one of your thefts from our Church; your National Convention is our Ecunemic Council; you abdicate reason, as we do, before its decisions; and you yourself Mr. Ratcliffe, you are a Cardinal. Henry Adams

The irony of American history is the tendency of good white Americanas to presume racial innocence. Ignorance of how we are shaped racially is the first sign of privilege. In other words. It is a privilege to ignore the consequences of race in America. Tim Wise

Ignorance of how we are shaped racially is the first sign of privilege. In other words. It is a privilege to ignore the consequences of race in America. Tim Wise

..After all, acknowledging unfairness then calls decent people forth to correct those injustices. And since most persons are at their core, decent folks, the need to ignore evidence of injustice is powerful: To do otherwise would force whites to either push for change (which they would perceive as against their interests) or live consciously as hypocrites who speak of freedom and opportunity but perpetuate a system of inequality. The irony of American history is the tendency of good white Americanas to presume racial innocence. Ignorance of how we are shaped racially is the first sign of privilege. In other words. It is a privilege to ignore the consequences of race in America. Tim Wise

But show business has always been like that - any kind of show business. If these people didn't live intense and rather disordered lives, if their emotions didn't ride them too hard–well, they wouldn't be able to catch those emotions in flight and imprint them on a few feet of celluloid or project them across the footlights. Raymond Chandler

My children are monsters, Kiro thought. And I am responsible. Perhaps if I had read them the haikus of Basho when they were little instead of that American manifesto of high-pressure sales, Green Eggs and Ham... Christopher Moore

[Americans] were, for one thing, so smitten with the idea of progress that they invented things without having any idea whether those things would be of any use. Bill Bryson

Alice is fictional. This isn't. Jess C. Scott

If "RACE" becomes the norm, then harmony will not prevail. Henry Johnson Jr

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

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

Spare the rod and spoil the Memorial Day rotisserie. Brian Spellman

...citizens of the U.S. live under an Empire of “evil doers” who have set themselves juxtaposed to humanity instilling in us from our youngest days how to slay our human element in exchange for an external existence of malnourished pride. Steven Storm

Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death. Neil Postman