It isn’t like the rest of the country – it is like a nation itself – more tolerant than the rest in a curious way. Littleness gets swallowed up here. All the viciousness that makes other cities vicious is sucked up and absorbed in New York.
When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.
None. I think we should send a country some cupcakes. You think some cupcakes would cheer up North Korea? Kill ’em with deliciousness.
I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
It is astonishing that in a country so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak.
What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors. It’s astounding to me, for example, that so many people really seem to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free.
The relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others in order to end the racial nightmare and acheive our country.
This country will kill you in a heartbeat and still people love it.
This country was filled with violent children orphaned by war.
No country that permits firearms to be widely and randomly distributed among its population – especially firearms that are capable of wounding and killing human beings – can expect to escape violence, and a great deal of violence.
A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again.
Parents feel like immigrants in the country of the young.
In this country, some people start being miserable about growing old while they are still young.
We will be a better country when each religious group can trust its members to obey the dictates of their own religious faith without assistance from the legal structure of the country.
This race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall express myself as I am.
No one who has any self-respect stays in Ireland, but flees afar as though from a country that has undergone the visitation of an angered Jove.
When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flown at it to hold it back from flight.
Let my country die for me.
The most interesting place by far was Afghanistan. Just because it is a place that I cannot see myself living. The hardness of the people and the history of the country is just so completely intense.