Monday, March 5, 2007

Wrap-Up (According to Some Other People)

"There are no second acts in American lives....Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over." -F. Scott Fitzgerald

"No American can wait he can stand around and do nothing but he cannot wait, that is why he is not like Milton who served by standing and waiting, Americans can neither serve nor wait, they can stand and sit down and get up and walk around but they can neither serve nor wait." -Gertrude Stein

"In the U.S., you have to be a deviant or die or boredom."

"America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers."
- William S. Burroughs

"In the day we sweat it out in the streets of a runaway american dream. At night we ride through mansions of glory in suicide machine." -the Boss

"Americans are overreachers; overreaching is the most admirable of the many American excesses." -George F. Will

"This I Believe. By that name, we present the personal philosophies of thoughtful men and women in all walks of life. In this brief space, a banker or a butcher, a painter or a social worker, people of all kinds who need have nothing more in common than integrity, a real honesty, will write about the rules they live by, the things they have found to be the basic values in their lives." -Edward R. Murrow

"Build up your credit, build up your self-esteem, build up your bank account, moving up in the scene, everyone's living the American dream so we can build up an army and smash it to pieces" -Christine Anderson

"I've not only pursued the American dream, I've achieved it. I suppose we could say the last few years, I've also achieved the American nightmare." -Kenneth Lay

"We must stop talking about the American dream and start listening to the dreams of Americans." -Ruben Askew

"The American dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam..." -J.G. Ballard

"America is like an unfaithful love who promises us more than we got." -Charlotte Bunch

"To think that a once scrawny boy from Austria could grow up to become Governor of California and stand in Madison Square Garden to speak on behalf of the President of the United States, that is an immigrant's dream. It is the American dream." -Arnold Schwarzenegger

"There are those who will say that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is the American dream." -Archibald MacLeish

"People are so busy dreaming of the American Dream, fantasizing about what they could be or have a right to be, that they're all asleep at the switch. Consequently we are living in the Age of Human Errour." -Florence King

"If the American dream is for Americans only, it will remain our dream and never be our destiny." -Rene de Visme Williamson

"I see all this potential, and I see us squandering it. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off." -Tyler Durden

"Dreams come true. Without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them." -John Updike

"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… And one fine morning ——
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." -the Great Gatsby

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