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“John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
― Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress

“Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas ... with the music at top volume and at least a pint of ether.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

“Nite Owl II: But the country's disintegrating. What's happened to America? What's happened to the American dream?

The Comedian: It came true. You're lookin' at it.”
― Alan Moore, Watchmen

“If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire.”
― George Monbiot

“And when I speak, I don't speak as a Democrat. Or a Republican. Nor an American. I speak as a victim of America's so-called democracy. You and I have never seen democracy - all we've seen is hypocrisy. When we open our eyes today and look around America, we see America not through the eyes of someone who has enjoyed the fruits of Americanism. We see America through the eyes of someone who has been the victim of Americanism. We don't see any American dream. We've experienced only the American nightmare.”
― Malcolm X

“You're just another american who is willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick being shoved up your asshole every day... The owners of this country know the truth... it's called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it!”
― George Carlin

“The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“I've always resented the smug statements of politicians, media commentators, corporate executives who talked of how, in America, if you worked hard you would become rich. The meaning of that was if you were poor it was because you hadn't worked hard enough. I knew this was a lie, about my father and millions of others, men and women who worked harder than anyone, harder than financiers and politicians, harder than anybody if you accept that when you work at an unpleasant job that makes it very hard work indeed.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“People are continually pointing out to me the wretchedness of white people in order to console me for the wretchedness of blacks. But an itemized account of the American failure does not console me and it should not console anyone else. That hundreds of thousands of white people are living, in effect, no better than the "niggers" is not a fact to be regarded with complacency. The social and moral bankruptcy suggested by this fact is of the bitterest, most terrifying kind.”
― James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name

“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.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Dat's what they say of this cauntry back home, Kath: 'America, the land of milk and honey.' Bot they never tell you the milk's gone sour and the honey's stolen.”
― Andre Dubus III, House of Sand and Fog

“I guess it could be said that the inspiration for 'Requiem for a Dream' is watching the American dream not only destroy so many lives in the U.S., but infect the rest of the world with its obsession with getting more, ignoring the deadly effect that has on the planet.”
― Hubert Selby Jr

“I say, I can not identify that thing which is called happiness, that thing whose token is a laugh, or a smile, or a silent serenity on the lip. I may have been happy, but it is not in my conscious memory now. Nor do I feel a longing for it, as though I had never had it; my spirit seeks different food from happiness, for I think I have a suspicion of what it is. I have suffered wretchedness, but not because of the absence of happiness, and without praying for happiness. I pray for peace -- for motionlessness -- for the feeling of myself, as of some plant, absorbing life without seeking it, and existing without individual sensation. I feel that there can be no perfect peace in individualness. Therefore, I hope one day to feel myself drank up into the pervading spirit animating all things. I feel I am an exile here. I still go straying.”
― Herman Melville, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities

“I live in a house over there on the Island, and in that house there is a man waiting for me. When he drove up at the door I drove out of the dock because he says I’m his ideal.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Winter Dreams

“...all these things were part of the business of dreams. He had learned not to laugh at the advertisements offering to teach writing, cartooning, engineering, to add inches to the biceps and to develop the bust”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts / A Cool Million

“Harry had worked his way through the American Dream and come to the conclusion that is was composed of a good lunch and a deep red wine that could soar.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“The disruption of the anticipated American future that was simply to have unrolled out of the solid American past, out of each generation’s getting smartersmarter for knowing the inadequacies and limitations of the generations beforeout of each new generation’s breaking away from the parochialism a little further, out of the desire to go the limit in America with your rights, forming yourself as an ideal person who gets rid of the traditional Jewish habits and attitudes, who frees himself of the pre-America insecurities and the old, constraining obsessions so as to live unapologetically as an equal among equals.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“He was going to get the American Dream that even Americans dream about.”
― Nicola Yoon, The Sun Is Also a Star

“I said to him, "Krystal, to walk away you gotta leave something behind. I'll marry you on the condition that a wig never touch your head again." He agreed and we've been inseparable ever since. And we'll continue to be. Right, Yitzhak?”
― John Cameron Mitchell, Hedwig and the Angry Inch

“If immigrants ain't real Americans,
Neither is our revered Lady Liberty.
She too came from a distant land,
Yet today she is the American epitome...
Though I belong to the whole wide world,
Land of Lady Liberty is my home country.
A nation's character isn't defined by rigidity,
It is defined by a hearty unity in diversity.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Handcrafted Humanity: 100 Sonnets For A Blunderful World

“Careless is the first adjective that comes to mind when describing the rich in this novel. The dream they embody is an alloyed dream that destroys whoever tries to get close to it.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Progress is our most important product, General Electric says, and I had progressed to the front door of hell when all I had actually been striving for was a quiet purgatory. And I did not find it strange that hell had a soft blue sky, a springlike air, music, dust, laughter, curses.”
― Charles Stevenson Wright, The Wig: A Mirror Image

“Having children is the greatest sin in this country, according to Madam X. After a series of experiments, Madam X has concluded that having children is a very great sin. Hate is an evil disease.”
― Charles Stevenson Wright, The Wig: A Mirror Image

“It’s like selling people the American Dream and then telling them they can’t afford it.”
― Michael Marshall Smith, Spares

“It was the American Dream to strive for a future that might not exist.”
― Bremer Acosta, Father in My Name

“Almost every child on earth dreams of travelling to America, then you grow up, and you realize, it's the last place on earth any civilized person should step foot on - and those born here can't wait to get out. It's not American Dream, it's American Scream - utopia for a white, straight, misogynistic animal kingdom to flourish, but an absolute purgatory for a civilized human society.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Azad Earth Army: When The World Cries Blood

“It's not American Dream, it's American Scream - utopia for a white, straight, misogynistic animal kingdom to flourish, but an absolute purgatory for a civilized human society.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Azad Earth Army: When The World Cries Blood

“Hope Gone Sour (American Sonnet)

America is not a country,
America is an abomination.
America is a scourge on
the fabric of time, the
ideal tale of precaution.

America is a living record
of humans regressing to animal.
America is a perfect specimen
of democracy cleverly dismantled.

America is a nation built by
terrorists for the terrorists.
America holds world record for
humanity's worst of atrocities.

America is a promise of hope gone sour.
America is plague amongst fellowship of powers.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Azad Earth Army: When The World Cries Blood

“And, yeah, she had known when she signed the mortgage papers that she was agreeing to a certain degree of surveillance in exchange for finally living what she’d been raise to consider the American Dream. She had simply never considered that one day she might prefer waking up.”
― Seanan McGuire, A People's Future of the United States: Speculative Fiction from 25 Extraordinary Writers