USA
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Here, then, is motley multitude with intellectual wants to be supplied. These new votaries of the pleasure of the mind have not all had the same education; they are not guided by the same lights, do not resemble their own fathers; and they themselves are changing every moment with changing place of residence, feelings, and fortune. So there are no traditions, or common habits, to forge links between their minds, and they have neither the power nor the wish nor the time to come to common understanding. But it is from this heterogeneous, stirring crowd that authors spring, and from it they must win profit and renown.
Alexis de Tocqueville -
For all of the Twain’s enthusiasm for the giantism of American industry, the totality of his work is an affirmation of the pre-technological values. Personal loyalty, regional tradition, the continuity of family life, the relevance of the tales and wisdom of the elderly, are the soul of his books.
Neil Postman -
The symbolic for of television does not require any special instruction or learning. In America, television-viewing begins at about the age of eighteen months, and by thirty-six months children begin to understand and respond to television imagery… There is no need for any preparation or prerequisite training for watching television… Watching television requires no skills and develops no skills. That is why there is no such things as remedial television-watching. That is also why you are not better today at watching television than you were five years ago, or ten.
Neil Postman -
All their aggressiveness had been channeled into the struggle for money, and that struggle made them forget the bloody lessons of the Civil War. Later on, every one of them had so trained himself to forget, that during the depression he regarded unemployment as shameful proof of his own personal inability. I esteemed these men; I was an admirer of their America. At least no one here could justify his laziness by sighing: “If only nations were not predestined, if it weren’t for the Czar, if it weren’t for the government, if it weren’t for the bourgeoisie …” But paradoxically, that triumph of the individual had wrought an inner sterility; they had souls of shiny plastic. Only the Negroes, obsessed like us …, were alive, tragic and spontaneous.
Czesław Miłosz -
To kill time before my train left, I went into the only little theater there. The pure vulgarity of that burlesque show, stripped of aesthetic, plebeian, was fit for immigrant workers camps of the last century; even apes would have understood copulative movements of the girls on stage. A diversion for lonely males. But in the bar across the street lonely were deprived even of the consolation of stammering their confession to the bartender, for all eyes were riveted on the television screen. Was this the highest that l’homme sensuel moel could reach when left to himself, undismayed by the cyclones of history? The inside of the train, which I boarded a while later, was decorated with large reproductions of French Impressionists.
Czesław Miłosz -
Americans accepted their society as if it had arisen from the very order of nature; so saturated with it were they that they tended to pity rest of humanity for having strayed from the norm, If I at least understood that all was not well with me, they did not realize the opposite disablement affected them: a loss of the sense of history and, therefore, of a sense of the tragic, which is only born of historical experience.
Czesław Miłosz -
It was a black congregation. There was a tremendous sense of community. They sang magnificently and, in a kind of ecstasy, communicated not only with their Cristian God, but through him perhaps with all the deities that humankind has ever had. The atmosphere of friendship, mutual respect, and solidarity was fascinating.
Václav Havel -
But America is a rather odd country. It’s very religious, and at the same time it allows the broadcast of the pope’s funeral t be interrupted by advertisements, many of which were the direct embodiment of what he had criticized fir his entire life. I found it truly hard to understand, and it made me more and more uncomfortable, until I finally switched the television off.
Václav Havel