National Narrative Quotes

When you have the national narrative being "crack is awful and black people are using it," why go against that narrative when you want to get that publication in The New York Times or wherever? It encourages people to play right into it. ~ Carl Hart

This isn't to deny that there were fierce arguments, at the time and ever since, about the causes and goals of both the Civil War and the Second World War. But 1861 and 1941 each created a common national narrative (which happened to be the victors' narrative): both wars were about the country's survival and the expansion of the freedoms on which it was founded. Nothing like this consensus has formed around September 11th ... Indeed, the decade since the attacks has destroyed the very possibility of a common national narrative in this country. ~ George Packer

I'm not the only person who carries a lot of assumptions when I read the Bible, and it can be tough to entertain the idea that the Word of God has different perspectives in it. Biblical apologists spend all their time weaving these different viewpoints into a single frame, in an effort that often looks like squids playing Twister: fascinating, appalling, and hard to follow. We've seen what this approach to history can sow: a destructive oversimplification of the Church's past.
Americans treat their national narrative in much this way, too. We simplistically teach a single story in our history classrooms, of brave rebels who left cultures of tyranny and heroically crossed the Atlantic to found a nation built on freedom and justice. When we speak of our national sins, such as the genocide committed on Nation Americans or the brutal, longterm economic extraction of wealth from black bodies via slavery and segregation, we seem to dismiss these troubling matters as things that happened in the remote past but that have been resolved today. ~ Mike McHargue

But should we garner the courage and moral will to reject once and for all the fallacy of racial difference for the ideological conceit that it is, what will be the premise of our new national history, our new national story? Where will the frontiers of the new Malaysia be? And what will the new Malaysia look like?

None of us can answer these questions for certain, for any national narrative is forever a work in progress. Nations are constructs, based on the collective imagination and imaginary of their citizens. But as a nation in the making and under construction, we should at least have the courage to admit that some of our earlier premises were wrong (if not dangerous) and that the time has come to reinvent ourselves with some degree of hindsight and collective wisdom. One of the first steps that has to be taken is to recognise and accept that much of what we have been told as the first generation of postcolonial Malaysians was false, and that these instrumental fictions were tools to mentally bind us. ~ Farish A. Noor

As once-colonized nations seek to stand on their own, the countries once denuded of their past seek to assert their independent identities through the objects that tie them to it. The demand for restitution is a way to reclaim history, to assert a moral imperative over those who were once overlords. Those countries still in the shadow of more powerful empires seek to claim the symbols of antiquity and colonialism to burnish their own national mythmaking. ~ Sharon Waxman

We tell ourselves our own stories, selectively, in order to keep our sense of self intact. ~ Robert Stone

Government by three men in a room has turned New York State into a national symbol of governmental dysfunction. Enough is enough! ~ Michael Bloomberg

We want to determine whether he understands the inherent limits that make an unelected Judiciary inferior to Congress or the President in making policy judgments. That, for example, a judge will never be in the best position to know what is in the national security interests of our country. ~ Alberto Gonzales

Then there was a new epidemic - of fear," said Dr. Sam Okware, Commissioner of Health Services, when I visited him in Kampala a month later. Among Dr. Okware's other duties, he served as chairman of the national Ebola virus task force. "That was the most difficult to contain," he said. "There was a new epidemic - of panic. ~ David Quammen

My writing has always been what you call 'narrative fiction' in the sense that it's got very strong plots and twists at the end. ~ Anthony Horowitz

I would dodge, not lie, in the national interest. ~ Larry Speakes

Donald Trump threatened to file a defamation suit against me for running a TV ad that consisted only entirely of his own words on national television. Now, that's really a remarkable theory, that it is defamation to show people what he said on national TV. I think the voters are smarter than that. ~ Ted Cruz

With some songs, I have written narratives or I've tried to carry it through, but generally the things that were more genius, as far as I was concerned, were not that. ~ Stephen Malkmus

When you're in the studio, you've got a narrative for what goes on, you might switch on a bit of gear and it might not work as you intended or come out a bit wrong, and you try and exploit it. ~ Rob Brown

The time has already come when each country needs a considered national policy about what size of population, whether larger or smaller than at present or the same, is most expedient. And having settled this policy, we must take steps to carry it into operation. The time may arrive a little later when the community as a whole must pay attention to the innate quality as well as to the mere numbers of its future members. ~ John Maynard Keynes

It the Senator can find in Title VII any language which provides that an employer will have to hire on the basis of percentage or quota related to color, race, religion, or national origin, I will start eating the pages one after another, because it is not in there. ~ Hubert H. Humphrey

Respect and salute your democratic values and system; otherwise, you will obey and salute your enemies; it risks a defeat of your national dignity and solidarity. ~ Ehsan Sehgal

If you do a sketch, that's a very short narrative. Stand-up, it's bit-to-bit, minute-long narratives. ~ Kumail Nanjiani

It was a story no one could tell me when I was child. The story of Russian Jewry had been told in English, by American Jews; to them, it was a story that began with antiquity, culminated with the pogroms, and ended with emigration. For those who remained in Russia, there had been a time before the pogroms and a time after: a period of home, then a period of fear and even greater fear and then brief hope again, and then a different kind of fear, when one no longer feared for one's life but fear never having hope again. This story did not end; it faded into a picture of my parents sitting at the kitchen table poring over an atlas of the world, or of me sitting on the bedroom floor talking at my best friend.

The history of the Soviet Union itself remains a story without an narrative; every attempt to tell this story in Russia has stopped short, giving way to the resolve to turn away from the decades of pain and suffering and bloodshed. With every telling, stories of Stalinism and the Second World War become more mythologized. And with so few Jew left in Russia, with so little uniting them, the Russian Jewish world is one of absences and silences.

I had no words for this when I was twelve, but what I felt more strongly that anything, more strongly even than the desire to go to Israel, was this absence of a story. My Jewishness consisted of the experience of being ostracized and beaten up and the specter of not being allowed into university. Once I found my ~ Masha Gessen

Bin Laden wasn't all that central to the terrorist network any more, but taking him down created a kind of national catharsis. It's been a really, really long time since we had something to celebrate that didn't involve a sports team. I'd rather it had been a non-death-related occasion, but we'll take what we can get. ~ Gail Collins

Nast is an artist of uncommon abilities. His works evince originality of conception, freedom of manner, lofty appreciation of national ideas and action, and a large artistic instinct. ~ James Jackson Jarves

Perhaps the most telling witness against the claim of accurate history for the Bible comes when we read the earliest narrative of the crucifixion found in Mark's gospel and discover that it is not based on eyewitness testimony at all. ~ John Shelby Spong

Ponzi had been in Brazil, and then Argentina, where he bought a boardinghouse populated by prostitutes, along with a hot dog stand. He had hoped it would be the start of a national chain. ~ Glenn Beck

THE 1973 NATIONAL MAGAZINE AWARDS were held in a flyblown banquet room way up near the Columbia School of Journalism - an area not known for its elegance. Then again, neither were journalists. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

I am interested to learn that a group of distinguished men and women is to be formed to spread knowledge and appreciation of the rehabilitation which is going forward in Palestine under Jewish auspices, and to add my expression to the sentiment among our people in favor of the realization of the age-old aspirations of the Jewish people for the restoration of their national homeland. ~ Herbert Hoover

'Fast Food Nation' isn't about my journey into the dark world of fast food and the prison book is not about my journey into the prison world. I'm not using myself as any kind of narrative link. ~ Eric Schlosser

Overeating at Thanksgiving is a case in point. It's a national tradition. ~ Eric Samuel Timm

None of the harvest tales started out as parasites. They were the most powerful pieces of the narrative, once upon a time. We fought back, turned them tame, gave them names and labels that pinned them like butterflies in the textbooks of religious studies professors and folklore teachers all around the world. ~ Seanan McGuire

They now endure incessant cultural appropriation by a majority society in the United States that celebrates an idealized American Indian but ignores reservation life - the economic blight and marginalization of what are, in effect, national internment zones, exacerbated by federal inattention and mismanagement. In Indian country there are also thriving cultural traditions and creative genius, but these often receive little more recognition than the problems. - ~ T. J. Stiles

When President Obama asked Congress to raise the debt ceiling $2 trillion and offered sequestration as an offset, I opposed it. I did not believe we should put the country $2 trillion deeper in debt and impose irresponsible massive cuts to our national security. ~ Mike Turner

Instead of scrambling for security in national victory and domination, in preparation for war and military aggression, we must relearn the values of cooperation and sharing, of nonviolence and support. ~ Marva Dawn

Hispanic unemployment is higher than the national average and when the federal government is killing small businesses and killing jobs it is hurting the future of the Hispanic community and we need to carry that message. ~ Ted Cruz

Celebrity is a national drama whose characters' parts and plots are written by the tabloids, gossip columnists, websites and interactive buttons. The famous don't actually have to turn up to their own lives at all. ~ A.A. Gill

A biographer has to decide between slowing to a halt in a bog of conflicting possibilities or striding boldly across by a causeway of conjecture. I choose the second course and, without stepping aside to discuss all the alternatives, tell the story as I see it. Paul's next eighteen months unfolded somewhat as follows, though the tone of assurance in my narrative must not disguise that some of its conclusions are tentative and disputable. The ~ John Charles Pollock

Independent of politics, the changing narrative on immigration is directly correlated to the fact that we have new technologies that are allowing people to talk to each other and tell their own stories and organize themselves. ~ Jose Antonio Vargas

The child exasperated Marianne with her endless obsession with possession. She seemed to have absorbed the national sense of aggrievement, as if she, personally, were the victim of some great unfairness. ~ Jessica Shattuck

CDC Considers Counseling Males Of All Ages On Circumcision. ~ National Public Radio