Vic > Vic's Quotes

“He showed the words “chocolate cake” to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. “Guilt” was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of French eaters to the same prompt: “celebration.”
― Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“Don't eat anything incapable of rotting.”
― Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from the mere animal biology to an act of culture.”
― Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“Okinawa, one of the longest-lived and healthiest populations in the world, practice a principle they call hara hachi bu: Eat until you are 80 percent full.”
― Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them. ”
― John Updike

“Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“What they (Americans) do, they want to be in a hurry.”
― Henry Chadwick

“Our problem as Americans -- at least, among my race and gender -- is that we resist the very idea of limits, regarding limits of all sorts as temporary and regrettable impositions on our lives.”
― Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation

“It's not Americans I find annoying; it's Americanism: a social disease of the postindustrial world that must inevitably infect each of the mercantile nations in turn, and is called 'American' only because your nation is the most advanced case of the malady, much as one speaks of Spanish flu, or Japanese Type-B encephalitis. It's symptoms are a loss of work ethic, a shrinking of inner resources, and a constant need for external stimulation, followed by spiritual decay and moral narcosis. You can recognize the victim by his constant efforts to get in touch with himself, to believe his spiritual feebleness is an interesting psychological warp, to construe his fleeing from responsibility as evidence that he and his life are uniquely open to new experiences. In the later stages, the sufferer is reduced to seeking that most trivial of human activities: fun.”
― Trevanian, Shibumi

“Checking a box on a form for race—"Caucasian," "Hispanic," "African-American," "Native American," or "Asian-American"—is untenable and ridiculous. For one thing, "American" is not a race, so labels such as "Asian-American" and "African-American" are still exhibits of our confusion of culture and race. For another thing, how far back does one go in history? Native Americans are really Asians, if you go back more than twenty or thirty thousand years to before they crossed the Bering land bridge between Asia and America. And Asians, several hundred thousand years ago probably came out of Africa, so we should really replace "Native American" with "African-Asian-Native American." Finally, if the Out of Africa (single racial origin) theory holds true, then all modern humans are from Africa. (Cavalli-Sforza now thinks this may have been as recently as seventy thousand years ago.) Even if that theory gives way to the Candelabra (multiple racial origins) theory, ultimately all hominids came from Africa, and therefore everyone in America should simply check the box next to "African-American.”
― Michael Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time

“What my yia yia could never understand about America was why everyone pretended to be happy all the time.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“As an American, I'd like to apologize-for everything.”
― Rich Hall

“When an American family becomes separated from its toothbrushes and combs and pajamas for a few hours it considers that it has had quite an adventure.”
― E.B. White, One Man's Meat

“[Americans] were, for one thing, so smitten with the idea of progress that they invented things without having any idea whether those things would be of any use.”
― Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life

“The term [Americanization] invokes the transformation of the landscape into unnatural mechanical shapes, of night into day, of speed for its own sake, an irrational passion for novelty at the expense of quality, a worship of gimmickry.”
― Robert Stone

“I am often asked the question How can the masses permit themselves to be exploited by the few. The answer is By being persuaded to identify with them.”
― E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

“In a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.”
― Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

“Our economy is based on spending billions to persuade people that happiness is buying things, and then insisting that the only way to have a viable economy is to make things for people to buy so they’ll have jobs and get enough money to buy things.”
― Philip Slater

“Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Cash is always the deciding factor in such matters of moral politics; nothing ever gets done unless motivated by commerce or greed.”
― Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair

“The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell.”
― Confucius

“Consumerism thrives on emotional voids.”
― Caroline Knapp, Appetites: Why Women Want

“But every acquisition that is disproportionate to the labor spent on it is dishonest.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“It shouldn't be the consumer's responsibility to figure out what's cruel and what's kind, what's environmentally destructive and what's sustainable. Cruel and destructive food products should be illegal. We don't need the option of buying children's toys made with lead paint, or aerosols with chlorofluorocarbons, or medicines with unlabeled side effects. And we don't need the option of buying factory-farmed animals.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals