| We are all members of one community
and we have a common goal ... improving the economic and social
conditions of our city and making it a more desirable place
in which to live.
- Robert West, San
Antonio Riverwalk
Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty
even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose
dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so? We appear to have
lost the capacity to question the present, much less offer alternatives
to it. Why is it so beyond us to conceive of a different set
of arrangements to our common advantage?
- Tony Judt, What
is living and what is dead
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched
to everything else in the Universe.
- John Muir
(poster)
National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American,
absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than
our worst.
- Wallace
Stegner
Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some
other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the
change that we seek.
- Barack Obama
How about we do something more powerful, more meaningful? What
if we helped cities express themselves and share their voices?
My first thought was to ask the people of Pittsburgh
what they want to share with the world. That's one way
to think about it. My next thought was to give them the tools,
show them how, and get the most authentic voice.
- Chris Brogan, How
Bloggers Can Work With Tourism Boards
Perhaps it's in our blood, maybe it's just in our history,
but surely it's in the American vein to head out for some other
place when home becomes intolerable, or merely when the distant
side of the beyond seems a lure we can't resist.
- William Least Heat Moon, Blue
Highways
There was one main reason why America's founding fathers gave
Thomas Jefferson, not Benjamin Franklin, the job of composing
the Declaration of Independence in 1776. They were afraid that
Franklin, a compulsive teaser and trickster, would slip jokes
into the document.
- Rob Brezsny, Free
Will Astrology
Rhode
Island is a neither a road nor an island. Discuss.
- Joseph Jaffe, Join
the Conversation
If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said
faster horses.
- Henry Ford.
What happens in Vegas,
stays in Vegas.
- Slogan
The words 'urban,' 'rural,' and 'suburban' are less distinct
every day. L.A. Is less a contained area than it is a sprawling
neighborhood, and just down the street lies Albuquerque, nearer
by plane than Pasadena by car from Santa Monica in traffic.
And Albuquerque is merely, in turn, an overgrown shopping mall
for Santa
Fe.
- Michael Ventura, Shadow
Dancing in the USA
We are still more the cultural descendants of Columbus and
Coronado than we are of the natives we replaced.
- Wes Jackson, Becoming
Native to This Place
A young crew of Spanish adventurers were dispatched into the
heart of the North American continent to locate the mythical
Seven Cities of Cíbola. They penetrated the continent
to what is now Central Kansas. The trek of these conquerors
amounted to the establishment of a line that would divide history
and prehistory.
- Wes Jackson, Becoming
Native to This Place
We have really everything in common with America nowadays except,
of course, language.
- Oscar Wild
We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant
facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values.
For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth
and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of
its people.
- John F. Kennedy
We are all stupid, just on different subjects.
- Mark Twain
I've got no quarrel with the Midwest.
- Bob Seger
I was born in a small town.
- John Mellencamp
American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful,
and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
- James Baldwin
Oh, say can you see,
By the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hailed
At the twilight's last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars,
Through the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched
Were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets' red glare,
The bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night
That our flag was still there.
O, say, does that
Star-Spangled Banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free
And the home of the brave?
- United
States of America National Anthem: Star Spangled Banner
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