American Experiment Quotes

“Every other day there was a newspaper column huffing about "the American Experiment." As if the experiment hadn't finished and we didn't know the results.”
― Colson Whitehead, Crook Manifesto

“When the pendulum swings and it reaches an extreme on either side, you're going to get a totalitarianism, no matter what it starts out calling itself because once people with extreme ideologies actually get some power - although they may have come in on this will make everything wonderful, except we have to get rid of those people, and there's always a those people that have to be gotten rid of - and then that doesn't happen, and they've got some power. And they quite enjoy it, and they wish to retain it.

So the American experiment, one of the hallmarks of it was peaceful transfer of power. That is what we consider, you know, one of the absolute key elements of an open liberal democracy. And when you see that starting to be shut down and going away, rule of law goes out the window, another kind of law replaces it, which is joined at the hip with whoever's running the thing. And if you get on the bad side of that, you're kind of doomed because you're not going to get a fair trial, and you're probably going to get a bullet in the back of the neck.”
― Margaret Atwood