culture-of-the-united-states

"For two years after “I Want to Hold Your Hand” topped the U.S. charts in February 1964, the only sound that mattered had a British accent. The Dave Clark Five, Herman’s Hermits, Petula Clark: it was an obsession that went beyond the Beatles—and initially ignored the Rolling Stones."

"Today, the term “the British Invasion” is usually employed to describe (and market) the triumphal epoch of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Who, with honorable mentions to the Kinks and the Animals. In hindsight, and on merit, this sounds about right—these are the best and most revered of the English bands who came of age in the 1960s—but the reality of the British Invasion, which was at its most intense in the two years immediately following the Beatles’ landfall, was somewhat different. Far from being solely a beat-group explosion, the Invasion was a rather eclectic phenomenon that took in everything from Petula Clark’s lushly symphonic pop to Chad and Jeremy’s dulcet folk-schlock to the Yardbirds’ blues-rock rave-ups."

"Yankee Doodle went to town A-riding on a pony, Stuck a feather in his hat And called it macaroni."

", n. In Europe, an American. In the Northern States of our Union, a New Englander. In the Southern States the word is unknown. (See )"

"Our country's motto is E Pluribus Unum, out of many we are one. Will we stay true to that motto? Well, we heard Donald Trump's answer last week at his convention. He wants to divide us from the rest of the world and from each other. He's betting that the perils of today's world will blind us to its unlimited promise. He's taken the Republican Party a long way, from morning in America to midnight in America. He wants us to fear the future and fear each other. Well, you know, a great Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt came up with the perfect rebuke to Trump more than 80 years ago during a much more perilous time: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself!"

"E pluribus unum, the constructive principle of federation, In God We Trust, the recognition of God's limitless fatherhood — these two watchwords, together with that of Liberty, should be our creed, not that spurious label democracy which our American forebears despised and execrated."

"I gazed on the mountains in grandeur majestic, I gazed on the vales—they were fruitful and fair; I gazed with delight on the lakes and the fountains, I gazed on the banner—the eagle was there. "E pluribus unum" exultingly waves, E pluribus unum! what freemen and slaves? The genius of liberty, maiden celestial, Sat nigh that gay banner attempting to smile; Alternately gazing on eagle and fetters, The tears from her eyes trickled down all the while, And she sighed where the banner of liberty waves, o'er traitors, and tyrants, and heart-broken slaves."

"I will put in my poems that with you is heroism upon land and sea, And I will report all heroism from an American point of view."

"I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,... The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing, Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else..."

"To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin."

"One of his hobbies was to wait for the American Shakespeare — a hobby more patient than angling."

"Here is one of the fundamental defects of American fiction—perhaps the one character that sets it off sharply from all other known kinds of contemporary fiction. It habitually exhibits, not a man of delicate organization in revolt against the inexplicable tragedy of existence, but a man of low sensibilities and elemental desires yielding himself gladly to his environment, and so achieving what, under a third-rate civilization, passes for success. To get on: this is the aim. To weigh and reflect, to doubt and rebel: this is the thing to be avoided."

"A superior man’s struggle in the world is not with exterior lions, trusts, margraves, policemen, rivals in love, German spies, radicals and tornadoes, but with the obscure, atavistic impulses within him—the impulses, weaknesses and limitations that war with his notion of what life should be. ... The hero of the inferior—i.e., the typically American—novel engages in no such doomed and fateful combat. His conflict is not with the inexplicable ukases of destiny, the limitations of his own strength, the dead hand upon him, but simply with the superficial desires of his elemental fellow men. He thus has a fair chance of winning—and in bad fiction that chance is always converted into a certainty. So he marries the daughter of the owner of the factory and eventually gobbles the factory itself. His success gives thrills to persons who can imagine no higher aspiration. He embodies their optimism, as the other hero embodies the pessimism of more introspective and idealistic men. He is the protagonist of that great majority which is so inferior that it is quite unconscious of its inferiority."

"God damn the continent of Europe. It is of merely antiquarian interest.... You may have spoken in jest about New York as the capital of culture but in 25 years it will be just as London is now. Culture follows money and all the refinements of aestheticism can’t stave off its change of seat (Christ! what a metaphor). We will be the Romans in the next generation as the English are now."

"In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent business man."

"American muse, whose strong and diverse heart So many men have tried to understand But only made it smaller with their art, Because you are as various as your land."

"The Muse, disgusted at an age and clime, Barren of every glorious theme, In distant lands now waits a better time, Producing subjects worthy fame."

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. But it’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since."

"American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither."

"When you stop to think, the whole idea of comprehension has a faintly archaic taste, like the sound of forgotten tongues or a look into a Victorian camera obscura. We Americans are much higher on simple understanding. It makes it easier to read the billboards when you're heading into town on the expressway at plus-fifty. To comprehend, the mental jaws have to gape wide enough to make the tendons creak. Understanding, however, can be purchased on every paperback-book rack in America."

"I am creating part of American literature, and I was very aware of doing that, of adding to American literature. The critics haven't recognized my work enough as another tradition of American literature."

"Native American literature should be important to Americans not as a curio, an artifact of the American past that has little pertinence to an American present or future, but rather as a major tradition that informs American writers ranging from Cotton Mather and Nathaniel Hawthorne through Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and William Faulkner to Adrienne Rich, Toni Cade Bambara, and Judy Grahn."

"When people talk about American literature, they really mean Hemingway, Faulkner and Poe and when they do include women it's Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay. To decide to take that on and say, 'I will speak and will be heard'-that takes a lot of guts."

"At this weak, pale, tabescent moment in the history of American literature, we need a battalion, a brigade, of Zolas to head out into this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hog-stomping, Baroque country of ours and reclaim it as literary property."

"The literary America in which I found myself after I published The Twenty-Seventh City bore a strange resemblance to the St. Louis I'd grown up in: a once-great city that had been gutted and drained by white flight and superhighways. Ringing the depressed urban core of serious fiction were prosperous new suburbs of mass entertainments. Much of the inner city’s remaining vitality was concentrated in the black, Hispanic, Asian, gay, and women’s communities that had taken over the structures vacated by fleeing straight white males."

"Most of the books published during the five-year period leading up to, during, and after the invasion [of Mexico] were war-mongering tracts. Euro-American settlers were nearly all literate, and this was the period of the foundational "American literature," with writers James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville all active-each of whom remains read, revered, and studied in the twenty-first century, as national and nationalist writers, not as colonialists."

"Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead."

"The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru."

"But why should the Americans write books, when a six weeks passage brings them, in their own tongue, our sense, science, and genius, in bales and hogsheads? Prairies, steam-boats, grist-mills, are their natural objects for centuries to come."

"The character of the American literature is, generally speaking, pretty justly appreciated in Europe. The immense exhalation of periodical trash, which penetrates into every cot and corner of the country, and which is greedily sucked in by all ranks, is unquestionably one cause of its inferiority."

"It does not follow because many books are written by persons born in America that there exists an American literature. Books which imitate or represent the thoughts and life of Europe do not constitute an American literature. Before such can exist, an original idea must animate this nation and fresh currents of life must call into life fresh thoughts along its shores."

"America is now wholly given over to a d——d mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash — and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed."

"It would seem that in our great unendowed, unfurnished, unentertained and unentertaining continent, where we all sit sniffing, as it were, the very earth of our foundations, we ought to have leisure to turn out something handsome from the very heart of simple nature."

"The Confederacy sought to overthrow our constitutional government. When the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, they were not merely firing at 'Federals' or the Union army. They were firing at the United States Army and the U.S. flag."

"Communists sentenced my father's father to ten years hard labor for having a small American flag in his possession (by that time he had been a leader of the social democrats for some years). At his "trial" he was asked why he had the flag. Was he a spy? He replied that it represented freedom better than any other symbol he knew, and that he had a right to have it."

"Other nations may deem their flags the best and cheer them with fervid elation. But the flag of the North and South and West is the flag of flags, the flag of Freedom's nation. Hurrah for the flag of the free! May it wave as our standard forever. The gem of the land and the sea. The banner of the right. Let despots remember the day. When our fathers with mighty endeavor. Proclaimed as they marched to the fray. That by their might and by their right. It waves forever."

"The star spangled banner bring hither. O'er Columbia's true sons let it wave. May the wreaths they have won never wither. Nor its stars cease to shine on the brave...Thy banners make tyranny tremble when borne by the red, white and blue... Three cheers for the red, white, and blue!"

"It is time to remember that old wisdom our soldiers will never forget: that whether we are black or brown or white, we all bleed the same red blood of patriots, we all enjoy the same glorious freedoms, and we all salute the same great American Flag."

"Oh, may our stars and stripes still wave forever o'er the free and brave!"

"Yes and there were Union men who wept with joyful tears when they saw the honored flag they had not seen for years... Hurrah, hurrah! We bring the jubilee! Hurrah, hurrah! The flag that makes you free!"

"[T]he now infamous banner of the Yankee vandals."

"The American flag flies again over our embassy in Kabul. Terrorists who once occupied Afghanistan now occupy cells at Guantanamo Bay. And terrorist leaders who urged followers to sacrifice their lives are running for their own."

"American ideals of opportunity and equality come to us across the generations. And they have attracted millions from across the world. Yet there are young Americans growing up here, under this flag, who doubt the promise and justice of our country. They live in neighborhoods occupied by gangs and ruled by fear. They are entitled by law to an education, yet do not receive an education. They hear talk of opportunity and see little evidence of opportunity around them."

"Boys, I only did my duty; the old flag never touched the ground!"

"Hurrah! Hurrah! We'll join the jubilee! And that's going some, for the Yankees, by gum! Red, White and Blue, I am for you! Honest, you're a grand old flag! I'm no cranky hanky panky, I'm a dead square, honest Yankee. And I'm mighty proud of that old flag that flies for Uncle Sam. Though I don't believe in raving ev'ry time I see it waving, there's a chill runs up my back that makes me glad I'm what I am. Here's a land with a million soldiers. That's if we should need 'em, We'll fight for freedom! Hurrah! Hurrah! For ev'ry Yankee Tar. And old GAR, every stripe, every star. Red, White and Blue, hats off to you! Honest, you're a grand old flag! You're a grand old flag, You're a high-flying flag, And forever in peace may you wave. You're the emblem of the land I love, The home of the free and the brave. Ev'ry heart beats true 'Neath the Red, White and Blue, Where there's never a boast or brag. But should auld acquaintance be forgot, Keep your eye on the grand old flag."

"Works which endure come from the soul of the people. The mighty in their pride walk alone to destruction. The humble walk hand in hand with providence to immortality. Their works survive... When the people of the colonies were defending their liberties against the might of kings, they chose their banner from the design set in the firmament through all eternity. The flags of great empires of that day have gone, but the stars and stripes remain. It pictures a vision of a people whose eyes are turned to the rising dawn. It represents of the hope of a father for his posterity. It was never flaunted for the glory of royalty, but to be born under it is to be the child of a king, and to establish a home under it is to be the founder of a royal house. Alone of all flags, it expresses the sovereignty of the people which endures when all else passes away. Speaking with their voice, it has the sanctity of revelations. He who lives under it and disloyal to it is a traitor to the human race everywhere. What could be saved if the flag of the American nation were to perish?"

"Uphold the flag; the American flag."

"If today we have a country not boiling in an agony of blood, like France, if now we have a united country, no longer cursed by the hell-black system of human bondage, if the American name is no longer a by-word and a hissing to a mocking earth, if the star-spangled banner floats only over free American citizens in every quarter of the land, and our country has before it a long and glorious career of justice, liberty, and civilization, we are indebted to the unselfish devotion of the noble army who rest in these honored graves all around us."

"I've seen through my life many times when people with hate in their heart put fire to the American flag. This time, permit me to go to your flag and, in the name of my people, give it a kiss."

"Oh, give us a flag, all free without a slave! We'll fight to defend it, as our fathers did so brave... We'll stand by the Union, if we only have a chance."