United-states Quotes - QuotesSweet | quotesweet.com

Category: united-states
Quotes of Category: united-states

Ta-Nehisi Coates _ Between the World and Me
It is truly horrible to understand yourself as the essential below of your country. It breaks too much of what we would like to think about ourselves, our lives, the world we move through and the people who surround us. The struggle to understand is our only advantage over this madness.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates _ Between the World and Me
You may have heard the talk of diversity, sensitivity training, and body cameras. These are all fine and applicable, but they understate the task and allow the citizens of this country to pretend that there is real distance between their own attitudes and those of the ones appointed to protect them. The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country's criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed from these policies-the sprawling carceral state, the random detention of black people, the torture of suspects-are the product of democratic will. And so to challenge the police is to challenge the American people who send them into the ghettos armed with the same self-generated fears that compelled the people who think they are white to flee the cities and into the Dream. The problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs."
book-quote racism united-states-of-america police
Adam Rex _ The True Meaning of Smekday
The United States was a big country where everybody wore funny t-shirts and ate too much.
book-quote humor united-states demotivational
James Baldwin _ Notes of a Native Son
It is considered a rather cheerful axiom that all Americans distrust politicians. {No one takes the further and less cheerful step of considering just what effect this mutual contempt has on either the public or the politicians, who have, indeed, very little to do with one another.}
book-quote politics trust politicians
James Baldwin _ The Fire Next Time
And if the word means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it. For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become.
book-quote love reality america
Colson Whitehead _ The Underground Railroad
The other patrollers were boys and men of bad character; the work attracted a type. In another country they would have been criminals, but this was America.
book-quote united-states-of-america slavery criminals
Colson Whitehead _ The Underground Railroad
If niggers were supposed to have their freedom, they wouldn't be in chains. If the red man was supposed to keep hold of his land, it'd still be his. If the white man wasn't destined to take this new world, he wouldn't own it now.Here was the true Great Spirit, the divine thread connecting all human endeavor--if you can keep it, it is yours. Your property, slave or continent. The American imperative.
book-quote united-states-of-america slavery possessions
Colson Whitehead _ The Underground Railroad
And America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. The white race believes--believes with all its heart--that it is their right to take the land. To kill Indians. Make war. Enslave their brothers. This nation shouldn't exist, if there is any justice in the world, for its foundations are murder, theft, and cruelty. Yet here we are.
book-quote war united-states-of-america slavery
Nikki Giovanni _ Shimmy Shimmy Shimmy Like My
It is interesting that a guy like W.E.B. Du Bois, who actually did very little, I should imagine, with his hands, wrote about "I am the smoke king." Without the labor, both free and slave, of African Americans this country would still be a wilderness.
book-quote labor race poetry
Herman Wouk _ Don't Stop the Carnival
Look at us. We build giant highways and murderously fast cars for killing each other and committing suicide. Instead of bomb shelters we construct gigantic frail glass buildings all over Manhattan at Ground Zero, a thousand feet high, open to the sky, life a woman undressing before an intruder and provoking him to rape her. We ring Russia's borders with missile-launching pads, and then scream that she's threatening us. In all history there's never been a more lurid mass example of the sadist-masochist expression of the thanatos instinct than the present conduct of the United States. The Nazis by comparison were Eagle Scouts.
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George Saunders _ Lincoln in the Bardo
Across the sea fat kings watched and were gleeful, that something begun so well had now gone off the rails {as down South similar kings watched}, and if it went off the rails, so went the whole kit, forever, and if someone ever thought to start it up again, well, it would be said {and said truly}: The rabble cannot manage itself.Well, the rabble could. The rabble would.He would lead the rabble in managing.The thing would be won.
book-quote war united-states-of-america civil-war
Howard Zinn _ A People's History of the
But the idea of a peace dividend could not be stifled so long as Americans were in need. Shortly after the war, historian Marilyn Young warned:The U.S. can destroy Iraq's highways, but not build its own; create the conditions for epidemic in Iraq, but not offer health care to millions of Americans. It can excoriate Iraqi treatment of the Kurdish minority, but not deal with domestic race relations; create homelessness abroad but not solve it here; keep a half million troops drug free as part of a war, but refuse to fund the treatment of millions of drug addicts at home. . . . . We shall lose the war after we have won it.
book-quote war united-states