War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to ‘feel good’ about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.
A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being.
In America the cohesion was a matter of choice and will. But in Europe it was organic.
In the end, for congenial sympathy, for poetry, for work, for original feeling and expression, for perfect companionship with one’s friends – give me the country.
The real tragedy of England, as I see it, is the tragedy of ugliness. The country is so lovely: the man-made England is so vile.
God how I hate new countries: They are older than the old, more sophisticated, much more conceited, only young in a certain puerile vanity more like senility than anything.
Only the desert has a fascination – to ride alone – in the sun in the forever unpossessed country – away from man. That is a great temptation.
At a time when politics deals in distortions and half truths, truth is to be found in the liberal arts. There’s something afoot in this country and you are very much a part of it.
The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them.
In Los Angeles all the loose objects in the country were collected, as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn’t tightly screwed down had slid into Southern California.
California is like an artificial limb the rest of the country doesn’t really need. You can quote me on that.
Here we write well when we expose frauds and hypocrites. We are great at counting warts and blemishes and weighting feet of clay. In expressing love, we belong among the underdeveloped countries.
In expressing love we belong among the undeveloped countries.
Each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice; for indeed it seems we have no other test of truth and reason than the example and pattern of the opinions and customs of the country we live in.
Lawyers and physicians are an ill provision for any country.
There is a huge gulf between the man who follows the conventions and laws of his country and the man who sets out to regiment them and to change them.
Everyone gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country.
The most wretched people in the world are those who tell you they like every kind of music ‘except country.’ People who say that are boorish and pretentious at the same time.
I grew up on a farm, and we didn’t have cable and only limited radio stations, so I wasn’t inundated with culture the way people in other parts of the country were. But I was really interested in it.
Medical care for the entire country seems to me a basic right. If every other country in the West can do it, why can’t we?