Defining Empty Sums

Famous quotes containing the words defining, empty and/or sums:

“The U.S. is becoming an increasingly fatherless society. A generation ago, an American child could reasonably expect to grow up with his or her father. Today an American child can reasonably expect not to. Fatherlessness is now approaching a rough parity with fatherhood as a defining feature of American childhood.”
—David Blankenhorn (20th century)

“Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room,
Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable,
Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table,
Pounded on the table,
Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom,
Hard as they were able,”
—Vachel Lindsay (1879–1931)

“If God lived on earth, people would break his windows.”
—Jewish proverb, quoted in Claud Cockburn, Cockburn Sums Up, epigraph (1981)