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“The United States is the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, yet its inhabitants are strikingly unhappy. Accordingly, we present to the rest of mankind, on a planet rife with suffering and tragedy, the spectacle of a clown civilization. Sustained on a clown diet rich in sugar and fat, we have developed a clown physiognomy. We dress like clowns. We move about a landscape filled with cartoon buildings in clownmobiles, absorbed in clownish activities. We fill our idle hours enjoying the canned antics of professional clowns... Death, when we acknowledge it, is just another pratfall on the boob tube. Bang! You're dead!”
― James Howard Kunstler

“This happened back east of course. I've heard that term a lot since coming to this part of the country. But I never think of the term as a marker of geography. It's a reference to time, a statement about time, about all the densities of being and experience, it's time disguised, it's light-up time, shifting smoky time tricked out as some locus of stable arrangement. When people use that term they're talking about the way things used to be before they moved out here, the way the world used to be, not just New Jersey or South Philly, or before their parents moved, or grandparents, and about the way things still exist in some private relativity theory, some smoky shifting mind dimension, or before the other men and women came this way, the ones in Conestoga wagons, a term we learned in grade school, a back-east term, stemming from the place where the wagons were made.”
― Don DeLillo, Underworld

“In the United States, there was no simpler, more agreeable time.”
― Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

“Bhutto brought up the coup in Afghanistan, which has resulted in deposing the country’s monarchy and replacing it with a republic under a nationalist cousin of the king. Kissinger said he had discussed the matter with the Soviet Ambassador. “I told him if the recent coup in Afghanistan remained an internal Afghan affair, that would be one matterâ€� he said, “but if it resurrected the Pashtunistan dispute, the U.S. would be engaged. This is the basic policy of the president.”
― Husain Haqqani, Magnificent Delusions: Pakistan, the United States, and an Epic History of Misunderstanding

“For in the end laws are just words on a page - words that are sometimes malleable, opaque, as dependent on context and trust as they are in a story or poem or promise to someone, words whose meanings are subject to erosion, sometimes collapsing in the blink of an eye.”
― Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream

“It's the working class that truly make things happen, even in America," he said. "And the workingman isn't valued. I fought in this war no just to stop Hitler and the Nazis, but to stop all people who want to oppress their fellow man. You may not like hearing it, but the United States isn't a true democracy where all her people are fairly represented. It's always the rich who get elected. How can they represent the poor man? The U.S. *could* be a true democracy, but it isn't.”
― Susan Meissner, The Last Year of the War