Famous quotes containing the words north american, north, american and/or people:
“The compulsion to do good is an innate American trait. Only North Americans seem to believe that they always should, may, and actually can choose somebody with whom to share their blessings. Ultimately this attitude leads to bombing people into the acceptance of gifts.”
—Ivan Illich (b. 1926)
“The North American system only wants to consider the positive aspects of reality. Men and women are subjected from childhood to an inexorable process of adaptation; certain principles, contained in brief formulas are endlessly repeated by the press, the radio, the churches, and the schools, and by those kindly, sinister beings, the North American mothers and wives. A person imprisoned by these schemes is like a plant in a flowerpot too small for it: he cannot grow or mature.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)
“Miss U.S.A. is in the same graveyard that [Amanda Jones] the twelve-year-old is. Where the sixteen-year-old is. All the past selves. There comes a time when you have to bury those selves because you’ve grown into another one.”
—Amanda Theodosia Jones, U.S. beauty contest winner, Miss U.S.A., 1973. As quoted under the pseudonym “Emma Wright” in American Dreams, Prologue, by Studs Terkel (1980)
“Freedom, my good girl, means being able to count on how other people will behave.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)