"God created war so that Americans would learn geography."
— Mark Twain

"Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half."
— Gore Vidal

"He showed the words “chocolate cake” to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. “Guilt” was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of French eaters to the same prompt: “celebration."
— Michael Pollan

"the greatest Americans
have not been born yet
they are waiting patiently
for the past to die"
— Saul Williams

"I'm a bit retarded, like most Americans."
— Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer)

"American long for a closed society in which everything can be bought, where laborers are either hidden away or dressed up as nonhumans, so as not to be disconcerting. This place is called Disney World"
— Adam Gopnik (Paris to the Moon)

"I don't believe there's any problem in this country, no matter how tough it is, that Americans, when they roll up their sleeves, can't completely ignore."
— George Carlin (Brain Droppings)

"Being an American is about having the right to be who you are. Sometimes that doesn't happen. "
— Herb Ritts

"Americans used to be 'citizens.' Now we are 'consumers.'"
— Vicki Robin (Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence)

"It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self- conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations are in a conspiracy to under-value them."
— Henry James

"Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth."
— Jean Baudrillard

"Anything that's strange is no good to the average American. If it doesn't have Chicago plumbing, it's nonsense."
— Ray Bradbury

"It is their mores, then, that make the Americans of the United States...capable of maintaining the rule of democracy.... Too much importance is attached to laws and too little to mores.... I am convinced that the luckiest of geographical circumstances and the best of laws cannot maintain a constitution in spite of mores, whereas the latter can turn even the most unfavorable circumstances...to advantage.... If I have not succeeded in making the reader feel the importance I attach to the practical experience of the Americans, to their habits, laws, and, in a word, their mores, I have failed in the main object of my work. -Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in American"
— Naomi Wolf (Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries)

"The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried [phrase-making] to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment’s reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication."
— W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)

"pp15 para5
The geography of bliss


"When Americans say it was great, I know it was good. When they say it was good, I know it was okay. When they say it was okay, I know it was bad."
-Laura Klos Sokol"
— Laura Klos Sokol

""Rachel? my dad prompts.
"Do I have to...?"
His stern expression answers my question
"Fine. I'm grateful that the Native Americans are finally getting revenge on the white man for destroying their culture, by building megacasinos.""
— Melissa Schorr (Goy Crazy)

"men who so uneasily tolerate superiors patiently suffer a master, and show themselves proud and servile at the same time."
— Alexis de Tocqueville (De la démocratie en Amérique, tome 1)

"It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination against other religious, racial or economic groups."
— Henry A. Wallace

"Ours is a shockingly dead view of creation. We ourselves are the only things in the universe to which we grant an authentic vitality, and because of this we are not fully alive."
— Frederick Turner

"Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them. "
— John Updike

"In the preface of "The Rifles"
"Another rule we followed was never kill an animal that we were not going to use for food or clothing." Barnabas Piryuaq
"Well, in those high latitudes we found such quantities of seals and walruses that we simply did not know what to do with them.There were thousands and thousands lying there; we walked among them and hit them on the head, and laughed heartily in the abundance which God had created." Jan Welzi 1933. "
— William T. Vollmann (The Rifles)