Quotes about Americans

In spite of the actuality that no one who is not extraordinarily cultured can even begin to think for himself, and Americans are not even remotely cultured personalities; and in spite of the actuality that marriages, families, religions, languages, public funds, public schools and libraries and post offices and clinics and even corporations and mass-media are all forms of “communism,” Americans take “mind control” and “communism” as the horror of all horrors (witness the cyclical crusades of Red Scares, the ever-piquant Invasion of the Body Snatchers, etc.).  But in spite of such a phobia against losing proprietary control of their “own” minds, Americans are one of the most cult-prone, mass-organized and –manipulable collectivities that has ever existed, as abject and pathos-besotted conformists down to their slavish toenails.  In the early nineteenth century De Tocqueville already observed this striking phobia among Americans against standing alone and thinking for oneself.  The bonds of subrational control over us are more potent than ever precisely because the critical culture, the “know thyself” that would make such controls accessible to conscious evaluation, has withered to nothing, eaten away by democratist fear of “elitist” critical intelligence and proprietarist neglect of and contempt for public education.

Too many American authors have a servile streak where their backbone should be. Where's our latest Nobel laureate? More than likely you'll find him in the Rose Garden kissing the First Lady's foot.

The best American writers have come from the hinterlands - Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Hemingway, Faulkner, Wolfe, Steinbeck. Most of them never even went to college.

Our campaign was not hatched in the halls of Washington –- it began in the backyards of Des Moines and the living rooms of Concord and the front porches of Charleston. ...This is your victory.  

People in america think they are so smart but what they don't know is that people in china think 2times as quickly as we do. So I say don't think as an american think as the chinese and you will get farther.

Esmeralda: What is your name?
Butch: Butch.
Esmeralda: What does it mean?
Butch: I'm American, honey. Our names don't mean sh*.

It was during this period that I stopped off in London and found a book called "A Brief History of Everything" by Ken Wilber.  Although strangely attracted to the book and to the cover, initially I couldn't bring myself to buy a book with such an arrogant title.  At that stage I hadn't discovered many Americans with a sense of irony and took the title to be literal.  (I have sinced discovered that Ken has a great sense of humour and most of our early communications were about "Absolutely Fabulous" and Eddie Izzard.)  The title is meant to be ironic but it is also strangely accurate.