Us Quotes

“unless we move beyond what’s behind us, we cannot reach out to what lies in front of us.”
― Dr Prem Jagyasi

“Most of us try to use our emotions and thoughts to lead a fulfilling life, which, for want of awareness, fails to be as fulfilling as we want it to be.”
― Dr Prem Jagyasi

“You and I. We are both immigrants. We both know it is hard to find your place in this world. You want to make your life better, work hard in country that is not your own - you make new life, new friends, find new love. You get to become new person! But is never a simple thing, never without cost.”
― Jojo Moyes, Still Me

“There is no mono-we; there are many usses. The usses change and interleave.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“I am waiting for my case to come up
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting for someone
to really discover America
and wail”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind

“Each time we cast our view toward distances that have not yet been touched, we transform not only the present moment and the one following but also alter the past within us.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life

“No wonder Americans seemed crazy to everybody else--they were utterly alone in the vastness of this ridiculously immense land. They all skittered about, alighting and flying off again like frantic butterflies. Looking for--what? What were they looking for?”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, Into the Beautiful North

“I want to write away all the truths and lies that happened between us.”

“What would remain then?”

“Us.”
― Nitya Prakash

“Wait till Buzz takes charge of us. A real Fascist dictatorship!"

"Nonsense! Nonsense!" snorted Tasbrough. "That couldn't happen here in America, not possibly! We're a country of freemen."

"The answer to that," suggested Doremus Jessup, "if Mr. Falck will forgive me, is 'the hell it can't!' Why, there's no country in the world that can get more hysterical—yes, or more obsequious!—than America. Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana, and how the Right Honorable Mr. Senator Berzelius Windrip owns his State. Listen to Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin on the radio—divine oracles, to millions. Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of President Harding's appointees? Could Hitler's bunch, or Windrip's, be worse? Remember the Kuklux Klan? Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut 'Liberty cabbage' and somebody actually proposed calling German measles 'Liberty measles'? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the—well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimée McPherson, who swam from the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona desert and got away with it? Remember Voliva and Mother Eddy?... Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?... Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition—shooting down people just because they might be transporting liquor—no, that couldn't happen in America! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours!”
― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

“What defines us is what we do when we become too sick to work.”
― Steven Magee

“Normal is guns and the normal America that really wants to be great again. Then there's another normal if your skin color is the wrong color and another if you're educated and another if you think education is brainwashing and there's an America that believes in vaccines for kids and another that says that's a con trick and everything one normal believes is a lie to another normal and they're all on TV depending where you look, so, yeah, it's confusing. I'm really trying to understand which this is America now. Zap zap zap.”
― Salman Rushdie, Quichotte

“This country is a land mass that could be called anything, and for people to act like this is some kind of sacred territory is an insanity. It's just a bunch of people trying to live together, and if we're not going to be part of a dream of equality--a part of a dream of that which is the best of us, the idea that people help one another--if we're not going to do that, then this land mass doesn't any more deserve to be revered than anything else.”
― Nikki Giovanni, Shimmy Shimmy Shimmy Like My Sister Kate: Looking At The Harlem Renaissance Through Poems

“I always thought that would be really neat if black people ever got control of the United States we would, of course, tear down some of the statues because we just don't like them...like all of Richmond would probably not have a statue standing.”
― Nikki Giovanni, Shimmy Shimmy Shimmy Like My Sister Kate: Looking At The Harlem Renaissance Through Poems

“Come be brave with me.”
― Nitya Prakash

“Westerners do not know what is going on in Venezuela because westerners simply refuse to know what is going on in Venezuela and prefer to believe in a parallel reality. Yes, believe, that's the word, 'to believe', as the opposite of 'to
know'.”
― Luís António Silvério Garcia, VENEZUELA: Westerners have lost the ability to reason!

“We are America.
We are the coffin fillers.
We are the grocers of death.
We pack them in crates like cauliflowers.

The bomb opens like a shoebox.
And the child?
The child is certainly not yawning.
And the woman?
The woman is bathing her heart.
It has been torn out of her
and as a last act
she is rinsing it off in the river.
This is the death market.

America,
where are your credentials?”
― Anne Sexton

“It's not the world we should change, we should change ourselves.”
― Susan Shrestha

“we call ourselves human but there is no humanity in us.”
― Susan Shrestha

“It's the social pressure which makes us to crave for porn.”
― Deyth Banger

“We are not meant to be in this country. We did not want to come. We were forced to flee or die. Americans perceive desperate brown masses swarming at their golden shores, wildly inventing claims of persecution for the opportunity to flourish in this prosperous land. The view from beneath the bridge is somewhat different: reluctant refugees with an aching love of their forsaken homeland, of a homeland that has forsaken them, refugees who desire nothing more than to be home again.”
― Bonne Annee

“Getting history right is pretty much the most important thing a citizen can do in a nation at war with itself--as ours was. And is.”
― Brooke Gladstone

“It is interesting that a guy like W.E.B. Du Bois, who actually did very little, I should imagine, with his hands, wrote about "I am the smoke king." Without the labor, both free and slave, of African Americans this country would still be a wilderness.”
― Nikki Giovanni, Shimmy Shimmy Shimmy Like My Sister Kate: Looking At The Harlem Renaissance Through Poems

“America has always been aspirational to me.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“Mais une société qui en protège certains par un filet invisible d'écoles, d'emprunts immobiliers subventionnés, de richesses accumulées, et ne consent à t'offrir que la protection d'une justice criminelle, cette société là a échoué dans la mise en pratique de ses bonnes intentions - à moins qu'elle n'ait réussi à imposer quelque chose de bien plus sombre. Quel que soit le nom qu'on donne à ce système, il n'a eu qu'un seul résultat: notre infirmité face aux forces criminelles à l'oeuvre dans ce monde. Que l'agent de ces forces soit blanc ou noir n'a aucune importance- ce qui en a en revanche c'est notre condition; c'est le système qui fait de ton corps un objet destructible.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“La rue fait de chaque journée une suite de questions piège, et chaque réponse incorrecte peut provoquer une raclée, une balle dans la peau, une grossesse non désirée. Personne n'en sort indemne. Pourtant, la chaleur qui s dégage de ce danger permanent, de ce flirt constant avec la mort, est excitante.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“In 2005 two thirds of the mortgages contained in Lehman’s issuance of $133 billion in MBS/CDO were sourced from its own subprime loan originators. A top Wall Street name was scraping the very bottom of the credit barrel.”
― Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

“And maybe that's the whole point, after all - that everyone of us who existed spent all those limitless days over the thousands of centuries we were here just trying to figure out what it meant to be us. The mousetrap trigger is this precise point: Pour the word us into the coding of a human, and we immediately discount as inferior or useless all the not-us things in the universe. Are you one of us?”
― Andrew Smith

“This is America,
This vast, confused beauty,
This staring, restless speed of loveliness,
Mighty, overwhelming, crude, of all forms,
Making grandeur out of profusion,
Afraid of no incongruities,
Sublime in its audacity,
Bizarre breaker of moulds,
Laughing with strength,
Charging down on the past,
Glorious and conquering,
Destroyer, builder,
Invincible pith and marrow of the world,
An old world remaking,
Whirling into the no-world of all-colored light.”
― Amy Lowell, What's O'Clock

“Usko on minun leipäni, ja Jumala on katto minun pääni päällä.”
― Judith Pella, Grayfox: A Companion Reader to the Journals of Corrie Belle Hollister

“We are born and we die, and what defines us is what we do in between.”
― Steven Magee