Heartland Quotes

Around 2008 and again in 2013 NATO officially offered the Ukraine the opportunity to join NATO. That's something no Russian government is ever going to accept. It's right at the geopolitical heartland of Russia. ~ Noam Chomsky

Many people believe the names of In 'n Out and Steak 'n Shake perfectly describe the contrast in bedroom techniques between the coast and the heartland. ~ Roger Ebert

In my experience conservatives hate reporters mainly because they see us as phonies. We reject the idea that we belong to a class, or that we have our own tribal beliefs. Sometimes the hypocrisy is something they've seen - upper-class liberals, railing about racism in the heartland from the comfort of an all-white suburban town, where they occasionally tip a Puerto Rican gardener or hire a Republican plumber. But a lot of it has to do with approach and tone, the way we openly write for and celebrate professional-sect audiences, unlike the columnists of the past, the Mike Roykos or Jack Newfields, who were unembarrassed to write in the language of the working person. ~ Matt Taibbi

It is, of course, its essentially schizophrenic outlook on society that makes the middle classes such a peculiar mixture of yeast and dough. We tend nowadays to forget that it has always been the great revolutionary class; we see much more the doughy aspect, the bourgeoisie as the heartland of reaction, the universal insult, forever selfish and conforming. Now this Janus-like quality derives from the class's one saving virtue, which is this: that alone of the three great castes of society it sincerely and habitually despises itself. ~ John Fowles

Heartland
Now that we've given our hearts away
With the bric-a-brac, we want them back.
Now we look for them secondhand,
Someone else's, in the old songs,
The slowly unfolding novels
We never had time for. Hearts
That taught themselves to fly;
…overstuffed hearts, still leaking
Downy secrets like feathers.

We want someone to say,
'I give you my heart', meaning,
'Summer and winter', meaning
'All my time in the this world'… ~ Lisel Mueller

I wonder if Jack and Diane ever made it
After the drums and the guitars all faded
Was the best they could do good enough
Or did the heartland just swallow 'em up

How did my mom and my dad ever do it
If there were troubles then we never knew it
I guess they had each other and that was enough

You know you can't keep the ground from shaking, no matter how hard you try,
You can't keep the sunsets from fading, you gotta treat you love like
You're jumping off a rope swing maybe 'cause the whole thing is really just a shot in the dark
You gotta love like there's no such thing as a broken heart
You gotta love like there's no such thing as a broken heart

What am I gonna tell my kids when they see
All of this bull that goes down on TV
When the whole world is down on its luck
I gotta make sure they keep that chin up

Cry when it hurts, laugh when it's funny
Chase after the dream, don't chase after the money
And know we got each other, that's what's up

'Cause you can't keep the ground from shaking, no matter how hard you try
You can't keep the sunsets from fading, you gotta treat you love like
You're jumping off a rope swing maybe cause the whole thing is really just a shot in the dark
You gotta love like there's no such thing as a broken heart
You gotta love like there's no such thing as a broken heart

You gotta love like there's no s ~ Old Dominion

That means laying out a vision of the world that competes directly with the one on harrowing display at the Heartland conference and in so many other parts of our culture, one that resonates with the majority of people on the planet because it is true: That we are not apart from nature but of it. That acting collectively for a greater good is not suspect, and that such common projects of mutual aid are responsible for our species' greatest accomplishments. That greed must be disciplined and tempered by both rule and example. That poverty amidst plenty is unconscionable. ~ Naomi Klein

How much do you know about the Heartland War?'
Connor shrugs. 'It was the last chapter in our history textbook, but we had state testing, so we never got to it. ~ Neal Shusterman

Liverpool Football Club is the heartland of football folklore ~ Brendan Rodgers

Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; who rules the World-Island controls the world. ~ Halford Mackinder

Consistently, from the Hezbollah heartland, my message was that Hezbollah must stop this cowardly blending ... among women and children," . "I heard they were proud because they lost very few fighters and that it was the civilians bearing the brunt of this. I don't think anyone should be proud of having many more children and women dead than armed men. ~ Jan Egeland

The whole importance of Iraq is that we have now created two things. One, Iraq is in the Arab heartland in terms of an attraction for people who want to fight the Americans and their allies. It's far greater than anything Afghanistan was aftertheSoviets invaded. It's easy to get to, there's no trouble with languages. ~ Michael Scheuer

Sounds travel through space long after their wave patterns have ceased to be detectable by the human ear: some cut right through the ionosphere and barrel on out into the cosmic heartland, while others bounce around, eventually being absorbed into the vibratory fields of earthly barriers, but in neither case does the energy succumb; it goes on forever - which is why we, each of us, should take pains to make sweet notes. ~ Tom Robbins

Country music was the most segregated kind of music in America, where even whites played jazz and even blacks sang in the opera. Something like country music was what lynch mobs must have enjoyed while stringing up their black victims. Country music was not necessarily lynching music, but no other music could be imagined as lynching's accompaniment. Beethoven's Ninth was the opus for Nazis, concentration camp commanders, and possibly President Truman as he contemplated atomizing Hiroshima, classical music the refined score for the high-minded extermination of brutish hordes. Country music was set to the more humble beat of the red-blooded, bloodthirsty American heartland. ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen

Georgie was quiet. Neal had never slept with Dawn. She'd always assumed he'd had lots of fabulous young sex with Dawn. Freshly scrubbed Heartland-teenager sex. 'Suckin' on a chili dog outside the Tastee Freeze,' et cetera. ~ Rainbow Rowell

There's a reason you probably haven't heard much about this aspect of the heartland. This kind of blight can't be easily blamed on the usual suspects like government or counterculture or high-hat urban policy. The villain that did this to my home state wasn't the Supreme Court or Lyndon Johnson, showering dollars on the poor or putting criminals back on the street. The culprit is the conservatives' beloved free-market capitalism, a system that, at its most unrestrained, has little use for smalltown merchants or the agricultural system that supported the small towns in the first place ... ~ Thomas Frank

What was shocking were the rewards my father's cousins had gathered in the intervening couple of decades. They farmed now on thousands of acres, not hundreds. They drove fancy pickup trucks, owned lakefront property and second homes. A simple Internet search offered the truth of where their riches had come from: good ol' Uncle Sam. Recently I clicked again on a database of farm subsidy payments, and found that five of my father's first cousins had been paid, all told, $3 million between 1995 and 2005 - and that on top of whatever they'd earned outright for the sale of their corn and soybeans. They worked hard, certainly. They'd saved and scrimped through the lean years. They were good and honorable yeoman, and now they'd come through to their great reward: a prime place at the trough of the welfare state. All that corn syrup guzzled down the gullets of America's overweight children, all that beef inefficiently fattened on cheap feed, all that ethanol being distilled in heartland refineries: all of it underwritten by as wasteful a government program as now exists this side of the defense industry. In the last ten years, the federal government has paid $131 million in subsidies and disaster insurance in just the county [in Minnesota] where I grew up. Corn is subsidized to keep it cheap, and the subsidies encourage overproduction, which encourages a scramble for ever more ways to use corn, and thus bigger subsidies - the perfect feedback loop of government welfare. ~ Philip Connors

Dude, you know I'm not getting paid for this shit, which is probably against the law. Child labor going on right here in the heartland of America!
-Dan Garrett ~ Leah Rae Miller

I built Rubicon from ashes,' said the other man. 'Ashes of war. I have worked hard to raise myself up from the poverty I was born into. Believe me when I tell you I have seen every kind of injustice, all across the heartland of my mother Africa. And now I have made billions of dollars from land and mining and technology. Now I can do something about it. As Lucy says, I am a very rich man.' He reached up to his neck and pulled out the silver chain between his fingers. 'I see you looking at this. Do you recognize it?'
Marc gave a slow nod. Now it was clear to him, he could see that the odd bit of discoloured metal was actually part of a weapon. It was the trigger from an AK-47 assault rifle. ~ James Swallow

The scientists Heartland works with demanded we host a ninth conference this year to foster a much-needed frank, honest, and open discussion of the current state of climate science and we just couldn't refuse. The public, the press, and the scientific community will all benefit from learning about the latest research and observational data that indicate climate science is anything but 'settled. ~ Joseph L. Bast

Lexington, Kentucky looks like paradise. Acres of grass as green and tender as a golf course putting green surround hilltop mansions. New Circle Road--a beltway enveloping the city's heartland like a moat--attempts to separate the wealthy landowners from the encroaching strip centers and fast-food joins that are symbolic of the rest of the state .... Combining the traditional feelings of Southerners with the uniquely gorgeous landscape of the bluegrass, Lexingtonians consider themselves and their region the cream of the crop--not only of Kentucky, but also of the nation. ~ Sally Denton

Wherever we live and wherever we come from is our individual heartland. Anything is possible and everything can happen. Pure imagination is in all of us - we only need to discover it, and sometimes story telling helps. ~ Mackenzie Flohr

The heartland lies where the heart longs to be. Sometimes it takes a lifetime to find the true place to plant it. ~ Vera Nazarian

They travel through the heartland, past cold factories and drifty towns, to the old, old mountains slumbering east of Tennessee. ~ Sarah Sullivan

The older America, until the 1890s and in some respects until 1914, was wrapped in the security of continental isolation, village society, the Protestant denominations, and a flourishing industrial capitalism. But reluctantly, year by year, over several decades, it has been drawn into the twentieth century and forced to cope with its unpleasant realities: first the incursions of cosmopolitanism and skepticism, then the disappearance of American isolation and easy military security, the collapse of traditional capitalism and its supplementation by a centralized welfare state, finally the unrelenting costs and stringencies of the Second World War, the Korean War, and the cold war. As a consequence, the heartland of America, filled with people who are often fundamentalist in religion, nativist in prejudice, isolationist in foreign policy, and conservative in economics, has constantly rumbled with an underground revolt against all these tormenting manifestations of our modern predicament. ~ Richard Hofstadter

I was living on Earth, where everything anyone needs pops out of replicators. Lack of professional credentials isn't really a big issue in the heartland of the Federation the way it is in other places, after all. ~ Michael A. Martin

She smiles at them as they go by and continues to play, making it clear that this furnace of a place, full of planes that cannot fly, is more than it seems. It is a womb of redemption for every Unwind, and fora ll those who fought the Heartland War and lost - which was everybody. ~ Neal Shusterman

Our success as a party will largely be determined by how well we do here in the heartland ... The time has come to be secure about our values. The time has come to lead. ~ Evan Bayh

No, it's not!" says Emby.
"Hey - he wanted my opinion, I gave it."
"But it's wrong!"
"You see, Hayden? You see what you started?"
"Yes!" Hayden says excitedly. "It looks like we're about to have our own little Heartland War. Pity it's too dark for us to watch it. ~ Neal Shusterman

He who controls the heartland controls the world. ~ Conn Iggulden

My music is the chicken soup kind. I want people to get a good feeling in their soul from these songs. Roots rock, heartland rock ... whatever you want to call it is OK with me. ~ Kate Voegele

Those of us who spent time in the agricultural sector and in the heartland, we understand how unfair the death penalty is. ~ George W. Bush

Whenever I hear some bigmouth in Washington or the Christian heartland banging on about the evils of sodomy or whatever, I mentally enter his name in my notebook and contentedly set my watch. Sooner rather than later, he will be discovered down on his weary and well-worn old knees in some dreary motel or latrine, with an expired Visa card, having tried to pay well over the odds to be peed upon by some Apache transvestite. ~ Christopher Hitchens

The Second World War is the largest single event in human history, fought across six of the world's seven continents and all it oceans. It killed 50 million human beings, left hundreds of millions of others wounded in mind or body and materially devastated much of the heartland of civilization. ~ John Keegan

So what strikes me most about the Heartland Conference is that I am with people that are in love with weather, climate, and their country, and many of them have loved these longer and stronger than I have. ~ Joe Bastardi

There's hundreds of corners on this island, Crystal said. And there are thousands of us. Exiles from the heartland without a heart. Out of the old country, a brand-new tribe, dancing to new tunes around a bucket of fire in a vacant lot. ~ Tom Spanbauer

Time is a gypsy caravan
Steals away in the night
To leave you stranded in dreamland
Distance is a long-range filter
Memory a flickering light
Left behind in the heartland ~ Neil Peart

Sometimes a rural life - without agricultural culture, community, or land - it means that you're a very long drive from everything. It's a big cultural isolation in terms of any kind of schooling where you could get exposed to things that might push the positive buttons. The geography of where people find themselves situated, both in metropolises and in the heartland, really starts to matter. ~ Debra Granik

It's too late now. The game's been won by companies who don't two shits about community character or decent jobs. Congratufuckinglations, America! We did the deal. Now we've got an unlimited supply of cheap commodities and unhealthy food and crumbling downtowns, no sense of place, and a permanent under class. Yay. The underclass isn't relegated to urban ghettos either. It's coast to coast and especially in between. Take US 50 west from Kansas City to Sacramento or US 6 from Chicago to California and you'll see a couple thousand miles of corn, soybeans, and terminally ill towns. It looks like a scene from The Walking Dead. If there's such a thing as the American Heartland, it has a stake through it. ~ Finn Murphy

We are 'tribals,' Yadeen and me from the Thak heartland, and Hulak, from the grass country north of Jindazhen," she told him. "We use the magic taught by our tribes and academic magic. Book magic. The masters who sneer are too blind to realize the gods and the immortals use no books. They think tribal magic is on the same level as hedge-witchery. They will mock you and do their best to shut you out of their oh-so-learned circles if you admit to taking other magics seriously. Lindhall is all right, and your other teachers. But be careful around the likes of Chioké and Girisunika. If you want to move up in Carthak, you stay clean of the stain of tribal magic. ~ Tamora Pierce

Kazakhstan is Mackinder's Heartland! ~ Robert D. Kaplan

What is to be done? We who are still half alive, living in the often fibrillating heartland of a senescent capitalism
can we do more than reflect the decay around and within us? Can we do more than sing our sad and bitter songs of disillusion and defeat? ~ R.D. Laing

Indeed, if I understand this global-warming business correctly, the danger is that the waters will rise and drown the whole of Massachusetts, New York City, Long Island, the California coast and a few big cities on the Great Lakes - in other words, every Democratic enclave will be wiped out leaving only the solid Republican heartland. Politically speaking, for conservatives there's no downside to global warming. ~ Mark Steyn

In the past, heartland whites with some kind of dream or desire left their towns for cities to become citified. They wanted to get away from religion, from their families, they wanted to come out, make art, have sex, have experiences. But this new crew was something we had never seen before. They were the first generation of suburban Americans. They came, not to be citified, but rather to change cities into places they could recognize and dominate. ~ Sarah Schulman

Wall Street has come to America's heartland, really. The only thing missing are the skyscrapers, you know? ~ Dennis Quaid

For a person accustomed to the multi ethnic commotion of Los Angeles, Vancouver, New York, or even Denver, walking across the BYU campus can be a jarring experience. One sees no graffiti, not a speck of litter. More than 99 percent of the thirty thousand students are white. Each of the young Mormons one encounters is astonishingly well groomed and neatly dressed. Beards, tattoos, and pierced ears (or other body parts) are strictly forbidden for men. Immodest attire and more than a single piercing per ear are forbidden among women. Smoking, using profane language, and drinking alcohol or even coffee are likewise banned. Heeding the dictum "Cougars don't cut corners," students keep to the sidewalks as they hurry to make it to class on time; nobody would think of attempting to shave a few precious seconds by treading on the manicured grass. Everyone is cheerful, friendly, and unfailingly polite.

Most non-Mormons think of Salt Lake City as the geographic heart of Mormonism, but in fact half the population of Salt Lake is Gentile, and many Mormons regard the city as a sinful, iniquitous place that's been corrupted by outsiders. To the Saints themselves, the true Mormon heartland is here in Provo and surrounding Utah County--the site of chaste little towns like Highland, American Fork, Orem, Payson and Salem--where the population is nearly 90 percent LDS. The Sabbath is taken seriously in these parts. Almost all businesses close on Sundays, as do public swimming pools, e ~ Jon Krakauer

Well, perhaps Falconer will be able to figure it out; he's usually a good judge of character. I say the sooner we reach the Heartland the better. I, for one, am eager to rid him of our 'boring' company ~ Nicole Sager

It would be nice if areas could be revitalised - like places in the U.S. such as Pittsburgh, for example, which have been transformed through shale. There you have shiny cars in a shiny city because of the development of shale in an old industrial heartland. ~ Jim Ratcliffe