America

(254 votes)   American ''energy'' is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed by chronic cultural dislocations which must be, for the most part, ferociously sublimated. This energy has mainly been sublimated into crude materialism and acquisitiveness. Into hectic philanthropy. Into benighted moral crusades, the most spectacular of which was Prohibition. Into an awesome talent for uglifying countryside and cities. Into the loquacity and torment of a minority of gadflies: artists, prophets, muckrakers, cranks, and nuts. And into self-punishing neuroses. But the naked violence keeps breaking through, throwing everything into question.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(241 votes)   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.

Walter Abish
Author

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(227 votes)   God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.

W. H. Auden
1907-1973, Anglo-American Poet

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(219 votes)   The Americans are violently oral. That's why in America the mother is all-important and the father has no position at all -- isn't respected in the least. Even the American passion for laxatives can be explained as an oral manifestation. They want to get rid of any unpleasantness taken in through the mouth.

W. H. Auden
1907-1973, Anglo-American Poet

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(209 votes)   We must stop talking about the American dream and start listening to the dreams of the Americans.

Ruben Askew

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(197 votes)   I pray we are still a young and courageous nation, that we have not grown so old and so fat and so prosperous that all we can think about is to sit back with our arms around our money bags. If we choose to do that I have no doubt that the smoldering fires will burst into flame and consume us -- dollars and all.

Lyndon B. Johnson
1908-1973, Thirty-sixth President of the USA

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(195 votes)   As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms. Everybody is fairly decent, respectable, domestic, bourgeois, middle-class, and tiresome. There is absolutely nothing to revile except that it's a bore.

Henry Brooks Adams
1838-1918, American Historian

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(190 votes)   Good Americans when they die, go to Paris.

Oliver Wendell Holmes
1809-1894, American Author, Wit, Poet

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(169 votes)   It's the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it. Everybody has their own America, and then they have the pieces of a fantasy America that they think is out there but they can't see.

Andy Warhol
1930-, American Artist, Filmmaker

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(157 votes)   The quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth... the pollution of American space, with gadgetry and cars and TV and box architecture, brutalizes the senses, making gray neurotics of most of us, and perverse spiritual athletes and strident self-transcenders of the best of us.

Susan Sontag
1933-, American Essayist

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(156 votes)   America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.

Oscar Wilde
1856-1900, British Author, Wit

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(156 votes)   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 of the earth are in a conspiracy to under value them.

Henry James
1843-1916, American Author

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(153 votes)   America is a great country, but you can't live in it for nothing.

Will Rogers
1879-1935, American Humorist, Actor

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(140 votes)   I have a great fear for the moral will of Americans if it takes more than a week to achieve the results.

Michael S. Harper

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(133 votes)   America does to me what I knew it would do: it just bumps me. The people charge at you like trucks coming down on you -- no awareness. But one tries to dodge aside in time. Bump! bump! go the trucks. And that is human contact.

D. H. Lawrence
1885-1930, British Author

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