Best 400 quotes in «usa quotes» category

In the late twentieth century democracies usually outperformed dictatorships because democracies were better at data-processing. Democracy diffuses the power to process information and make decisions among many people and institutions, whereas dictatorship concentrates information and power in one place. Given twentieth-century technology, it was inefficient to concentrate too much information and power in one place. Nobody had the ability to process all the information fast enough and make the right decisions. This is part of the reason why the Soviet Union made far worse decisions than the United States, and why the Soviet economy lagged far behind the American economy.

In the USA, when government funded research becomes inconvenient it gets shut down by the corporate controlled government.

In the USA, the police are encouraged to shoot people with the reward of paid time off.

In the United States the continued influence of the old elite meant that southern politics fell under the domination of a Democratic Party that gloried the Confederacy, the Lost Cause, the Ku Klux Klan, and resistance to Reconstruction. White supremacy was made into the fundamental cause of the South, and racism became the tool to enforce white unity behind the Democratic Party whenever a political challenge arose. Another tactic used over and over again to maintain the Solid South was to warn against outside threats and outside agitators. The mentality of a defensive, isolated, but gallant South helped Democratic leaders to deflect attention from the problems of their society and the effects of their rule. These powerful social currents, aided by women’s groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy, shaped and inhibited the region’s culture. Conformity to white supremacy, segregation, and Democratic Party rule was a social imperative for generations of southerners who were indoctrinated in the belief that they had suffered grave injustice with the defeat of their glorious Lost Cause. Had the diverse political leaders of so-called Radical Reconstruction continued to exercise some power or influence, the South would have been a very different society [187].

In times of war or peace the US will gladly pay a man to fail should his heart be in it, a small shimmering proof of the American dream.

In Venezuela Chavez has made the co-ops a top political priority, giving them first refusal on government contracts and offering them economic incentives to trade with one another. By 2006, there were roughly 100,000 co-operatives in the country, employing more than 700,000 workers. Many are pieces of state infrastructure – toll booths, highway maintenance, health clinics – handed over to the communities to run. It’s a reverse of the logic of government outsourcing – rather than auctioning off pieces of the state to large corporations and losing democratic control, the people who use the resources are given the power to manage them, creating, at least in theory, both jobs and more responsive public services. Chavez’s many critics have derided these initiatives as handouts and unfair subsidies, of course. Yet in an era when Halliburton treats the U.S. government as its personal ATM for six years, withdraws upward of $20 billion in Iraq contracts alone, refuses to hire local workers either on the Gulf coast or in Iraq, then expresses its gratitude to U.S. taxpayers by moving its corporate headquarters to Dubai (with all the attendant tax and legal benefits), Chavez’s direct subsidies to regular people look significantly less radical.

I often struggle with the perception of the USA and the reality, as they are distinctly different.

I pay more tax registered in Holland than I would in the USA, but better gieing to the Dutch to build dams than the Yanks to build bombs.

I regard President Trump as an international terrorist.

I regard the USA mass population routinely flip-flopping between the Republican and Democratic parties as a form of insanity.

I research what corporate governments do not want researched.

I respectfully kneel to the flag with the National Football League (NFL) players to highlight injustice and corruption in the world.

I sometimes think that the saving grace of America lies in the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans are possessed of two great qualities- a sense of humor and a sense of proportion.

I talked to Llewellyn and got a thick briefing packet with the key arguments on both sides. The problem, for those who wanted to stay in the EU, was that many of the arguments for Brexit were built on lies: about how much the UK paid into the European Union; about how Brexit wouldn’t hurt the British economy. Another problem was that the Brexit campaign was tapping into the same sense of nationalism and nostalgia that the Trump campaign was promoting back home: the days of Churchill, the absence of immigrants and intrusive international institutions. The arguments for staying in the EU were grounded in facts, not emotion: The EU was Britain’s largest market. The EU offered Britain a stronger voice in global affairs. Even the name of the campaign—Remain—sounded like a concession that life wasn’t going to be all that you hoped it would be.

I think it's terrible the way people don't share things in this country. I think it's a heartless government that will let one baby be born owning a big piece of the country, the way I was born, and let another baby be born without owning anything. The least a government could do, it seems to me, is to divide things up fairly among the babies.

I think this was a nice idea we had in this country and a nice landscape to experiment with. But I think there comes a time in almost any experimentation or idea, where you have to evaluate it, maybe our time has come. In the context of the real world, not just the American world but all around, we haven't done too well. We are not a very good advertisement for the idea we represented. If you lose one wheel of the car, you might be able to get to the side of the road, and some freaks can make it on two, but if you lose three, man, you're in serious trouble. I think we've lost three.

It is a fact that the USA corporate government routinely lies to its mass population.

It is a deep irony that the era in which America is commonly thought of as leading the world in a market revolution saw its housing market become dependent on a government-sponsored mortgage machine descended from the New Deal.

It is alleged that President Trump does not follow USA government guidelines regarding sexually transmitted diseases (STD).

It is a sad state of affairs in the USA that for the sick and the poor that jail offers better benefits than the freedom of no healthcare, bills that cannot be paid and starvation.

It is important to remember that blatant harassment of male workers by toxic female managers is also prevalent in the USA.

It is common to be refused medical treatment in the USA because your health insurance plan does not cover it.

It is difficult and even dangerous to make predictions—especially about the future—of the bilateral relationship.

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.)

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.

It is starting to become established science that eating corporate USA wheat may make you fat, sickly and possibly crazy.

It is not surprising that two of the most notorious modern mass murderers in the USA and Europe were both high altitude pilots.

It is sobering to reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.

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

It is through experience that I have lost faith in USA law enforcement.

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.

It is through experience that I know the USA is not the greatest nation on Earth.

It was ironic that one of the greatest experiences of my life came out of one of the worst experiences.

It pays to be really poor or really rich in the USA and it really sucks if you are in the middle earning a mediocre salary.

It’s best to keep America just like that, always in the background, a sort of picture post card which you look at in a weak moment. Like that, you imagine it’s always there waiting for you, unchanged, unspoiled, a big patriotic open space with cows and sheep and tenderhearted men ready to bugger everything in sight, man, woman or beast. It doesn’t exist, America. It’s a name you give to an abstract idea…

It's going on within this world wide corporation. Instead of marriage to the One above, it's lust for power and fornication to this currency currently in circulation. Manipulation to the out most, every time a native is manipulated, it's corkscrews and champagne toast, mashed potatoes and beef roast, living in Hell while they sip and dine on the east coast. Only a dream of prosperity through inflated currency, gold bricks which alone could keep up from catastrophe will soon vanish and no rate of interest will tempt it to return for eternity.

It takes a crazy person to understand a crazy nation!

It was the Crap that had driven me out—the Crap on TV, the Crap that crept though the mail slot and spewed from the radio, the infotainment Crap that passed for news. Americans were simply mad about the stuff. Billboards bombarded you. The president was full of it. The sky over every freeway exit glowed with corporate logos promising the dizzying array of Crap on offer there. It was relentless.

It seems that every time President Trumps government undoes an environmental regulation that the stock market goes to record highs. Another way of looking at this is that extensive environmental damage and destruction is rewarded by modern society.

It seems that in the USA that those who should be jailed respond by targeting those who expose them with termination.

It seems to me that America is constantly reinventing what "America" means.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the States, and the Big Country elates and irritates me simultaneously. It is a big boy child that frequently needs a hug: sometimes needing the prissiness of the world to remind it that its voice is not the only one. Africa is older and wiser, a poor grandmother, a pillaged woman, but still a strong woman. She knows she is a daughter of Earth. There are the sexy aunts of Asia and Europe, and of course, the fussy, once histrionic mother that is Britain. But it was Africa taught America the lesson of liberty.

I was astonished, bewildered. This was America, a country where, whatever its faults, people could speak, write, assemble, demonstrate without fear. It was in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. We were a democracy... But I knew it wasn't a dream; there was a painful lump on the side of my head... The state and its police were not neutral referees in a society of contending interests. They were on the side of the rich and powerful. Free speech? Try it and the police will be there with their horses, their clubs, their guns, to stop you. From that moment on, I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country--not just the existence of poverty amidst great wealth, not just the horrible treatment of black people, but something rotten at the root. The situation required not just a new president or new laws, but an uprooting of the old order, the introduction of a new kind of society--cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian.

I wanted to lead my students to another world, one where people value writing and art more than war, and yet I knew and I know that the only thing that matters is to make that world here. There is no other world. This is the only world we are in. This revisable country, so difficult to change, to easily changed.

I went from believing the propaganda that the USA healthcare system is the best in the world to recognizing that they were never going to correctly diagnose and treat me.

I was surprised at how corrupted the USA workers compensation scheme is for workers with occupational diseases.

Many people in the USA come to the conclusion that it is better not to purchase extremely expensive health care insurance and to use the saved money to self diagnose and treat with lifestyle changes, organic food, supplements and vitamins.

Iwo Jima had become the number-one front-page story in newspapers across the country. And it had become the most heavily covered, written-about battle in World War II.

Many years ago I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for that dream during the Second World War, when there was no peace. But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts us absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many lifeless bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.

Make sure you control the radio on a long road trip. You don't want to listen to some old-fashioned music the whole time.