The Puritans left England for America not because they couldn’t be Puritans in their mother country, but because they were not allowed to force others to become Puritans; in the New World, of course, they could and did.
I said, well, it’s a very primitive country, the United States, and it’s full of superstitions, which come out of a very fundamental religious bias, which is primitive Christianity.
The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country – and we haven’t seen them since.
Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.
Before the word gay had really been invented, was there’s no such thing. Only a country, basically as mindless about these matters – based upon our peasant superstitions, religious superstitions – would they make categories. Everybody’s everything.
Only a country that is based upon an extremely primitive religion, which is Christianity, I am a devoted enemy of monotheism in all of its forms, could have come with a categorizing of people as one thing or the other.
You can only have a war with another country. You can’t have a war with bad temper or a war against paranoids.
Now you have people in Washington who have no interest in the country at all. They’re interested in their companies, their corporations grabbing Caspian oil.
The Americans are clever. They thoroughly understand things that have to do with money, war, death, sickness. And there is also a real tradition of skepticism in this country.
Politically, of course, it’s to the Right, but then the whole country is to the Right.
If most men and women were forced to rely upon physical charm to attract lovers, their sexual lives would be not only meager but in a youth-worshiping country like America painfully brief.
USA is suffering between imperialists and anti-imperialists. That is the situation. The most powerful country in the world is on its way back to the Stone Age.
Nonprofit status is what created the Bible Belt. The tax code brought religion back to this country.
I think since Watergate people are interested in what the past of this country was really like.
I knew that I lived in a country in which the aspirations of black people were limited, marked-off. Yet I felt that I had to go somewhere and do something to redeem my being alive.
The strength and power of a country depends absolutely on the quantity of good men and women in it.
Death is not a journey into an unknown land; it is a voyage home. We are going, not to a strange country, but to our fathers house.
That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings.
In great countries, children are always trying to remain children, and the parents want to make them into adults. In vile countries, the children are always wanting to be adults and the parents want to keep them children.
You think you are dying for your country; you die for the industrialists.