Famous quotes containing the words american, birth and/or control:
“I have been spending my first night in an American “summer hotel,” and I despair of the Republic! Such dreariness, such whining callow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!... What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without a sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.”
—Edith Wharton (1862–1937)
“The birth of the new constitutes a crisis, and its mastery calls for a crude and simple cast of mind—the mind of a fighter—in which the virtues of tribal cohesion and fierceness and infantile credulity and malleability are paramount. Thus every new beginning recapitulates in some degree man’s first beginning.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“In Vietnam, some of us lost control of our lives. I want my life back. I almost feel like I’ve been missing in action for twenty-two years.”
—Wanda Sparks, U.S. nurse. As quoted in the New York Times Magazine, p. 72 (November 7, 1993)