Zafferano America Quotes

Jim Crow and mass incarceration have similar political origins...both caste systems were born in part, due to desire among white elites to exploit the resentments, vulnerabilities and racial biases of poor and working-class whites for political or economic gain. Segregation laws were proposed as part of a deliberate and strategic effort to deflect anger and hostility that have been brewing against the white elite away from them and toward African Americans. The birth of mass incarceration can be traced to a similar political dynamic. Conservatives in the 1960s and 1970s sought to appeal to the racial biases and economic vulnerabilities of poor and working-class whites through racially coded rhetoric on crime and welfare. In both cases, the racial opportunists offered few, if any, economic reforms to address the legitimate economic anxieties of poor and working-class whites, proposing instead a crackdown on the racially defined "others." In the early years of Jim Crow, conservative white elites competed with each other by passing ever more stringent and oppressive Jim Crow legislation. A century later, politicians in the early years of the drug war competed with each other to prove who could be tougher on crime by passing ever harsher drug laws- a thinly veiled effort to appeal to poor and working-class whites who, once again, proved they were willing to forego economic and structural reform in exchange for an apparent effort to put blacks back "in their place. ~ Michelle Alexander

The idea is the least labor and capital and resources you put together and the more you accumulate the better capitalist you are. So the suggestion I will make to you is that the idea of constant accumulation, which is what America is about, what consumerism, NAFTA are about, means that you always take more than you need and you don't leave the rest. So I suggest that it is possible from an indigenous world view that capitalism is inherently out of order with natural law. ~ Winona LaDuke

For a while I was on the cover of every Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, which was regarded as the pinnacle of success in America. ~ Elle Macpherson

We're not going to give tax breaks to billionaires and then cut back on the needs of our elderly or poor or kids or education. We're not going to privatize Social Security - in fact, we're going to strengthen it. We're going to provide quality education for every kid in America, from preschool through college. We have to take on these corporate leaders who are selling out the American people, whose allegiance is now much more to China than it is to the United States. If we have the courage to take these people on, I think we can overwhelm George W. Bush and his friends. ~ Bernie Sanders

Everything you need for your better future and success has already been written.And guess What? It's all available.All you have to do is go to the library.But guess what?Only three percent of the people in America have a library card.Wow,they must be expensive!No, they're free.Probably in every neighborhood.Three percent! ~ Jim Rohn

No one has the right to use America's rivers and America's Waterways, that belong to all the people. as a sewer. The banks of a river may belong to one man or one industry or one State, but the waters which flow between the banks should belong to all the people. ~ Lyndon B. Johnson

Business deals are successfully negotiated every day throughout America. The common thread is a mutual desire to reach an accord. And the media business is no different. ~ Gordon Smith

Latin America and the Caribbean are the happiest on average in the world. ~ Max Fisher

In the America I see from here, anything is possible - especially the impossible. ~ Tom Bodett

Good evening, America. I'm a woman, and welcome to The Late Late Show. ~ Whitney Cummings

It is a fact that our fresh water is becoming more scarce and that the new ways we are getting energy in America - fracking, mountaintop removal, cyclic steam extraction, deep-sea drilling - all pollute water, pollute the air, and pollute our soil and food. ~ Mark Ruffalo

If a society permits one portion of its citizenry to be menaced or destroyed, then, very soon, no one in that society is safe. The forces thus released in the people can never be held in check, but run their devouring course, destroying the very foundations which it was imagined they would save.

But we are unbelievably ignorant concerning what goes on in our country--to say nothing of what goes on in the rest of the world--and appear to have become too timid to question what we are told. Our failure to trust one another deeply enough to be able to talk to one another has become so great that people with these questions in their hearts do not speak them; our opulence is so pervasive that people who are afraid to lose whatever they think they have persuade themselves of the truth of a lie, and help disseminate it; and God help the innocent here, that man or womn who simply wants to love, and be loved. Unless this would-be lover is able to replace his or her backbone with a steel rod, he or she is doomed. This is no place for love. I know that I am now expected to make a bow in the direction of those millions of unremarked, happy marriages all over America, but I am unable honestly to do so because I find nothing whatever in our moral and social climate--and I am now thinking particularly of the state of our children--to bear witness to their existence. I suspect that when we refer to these happy and so marvelously invisible people, we are simply being nostalgic conce ~ James Baldwin

Even back in its colonial days, America developed a reputation as a safe harbor for people with unusual or radical religious beliefs. ~ Mitch Horowitz

The bottom was always falling out of something in America far as I could see. ~ Sebastian Barry

Racism is a complex and interconnected system that adapts to challenges over time. Colorblind ideology was a very effective adaptation to the challenges of the Civil Rights Era. Colorblind ideology allows society to deny the reality of racism in the face of its persistence, while making it more difficult to challenge than when it was openly espoused. ~ Robin DiAngelo

America must be a light to the world, not just a missile. ~ Nancy Pelosi

Usually, it is not my habit to address religious issues on the floor. I strongly believe in a person's right to religious freedom, as well as the separation of church and state. ~ Alcee Hastings

I wanted everything from and everything for him, because I wanted every piece of him. ~ Kiera Cass

The way we react to the Indian will always remain this nation's unique moral headache. It may seem a smaller problem than our Negro one, and less important, but many other sections of the world have had to grapple with slavery and its consequences. There's no parallel for our treatment of the Indian. In Tasmania the English settlers solved the matter neatly by killing off every single Tasmanian, bagging the last one as late as 1910. Australia had tried to keep its aborigines permanently debased - much crueler than anything we did with our Indians. Brazil, about the same. Only in America did we show total confusion. One day we treated Indians as sovereign nations. Did you know that my relative Lost Eagle and Lincoln were photographed together as two heads of state? The next year we treated him as an uncivilized brute to be exterminated. And this dreadful dichotomy continues. ~ James A. Michener

Recently, there's been a trend in America that I find very disturbing ... rewarding immoral and illegal behavior ... For example, we now give free needles to junkies, which seems to me to be only a step away from giving condoms to rapists. ~ Bill Maher

It's hard, in America, not to equate 'happiness' with 'things'. ~ Marisha Pessl

People nowadays have such high hopes of America and the political conditions obtaining there that one might say the desires, at least the secret desires, of all enlightened Europeans are deflected to the west, like our magnetic needles. ~ Georg C. Lichtenberg

Unfortunately, as inspiring as people find Barack Obama, change can be interpreted in so many different ways. I think he might do a great deal of good things for social programs here in America and as well, as much as people want to characterize anybody who's a leader and try and sell that, and market it and characterize them in a good way or a bad way, I think it's very telling about the system that we have when we come to the realization that the war is not going to end. ~ Immortal Technique

You see, a witch has to have a familiar, some little animal like a cat or a toad. He helps her somehow. When the witch dies the familiar is suppose to die too, but sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes, if it's absorbed enough magic, it lives on. Maybe this toad found its way south from Salem, from the days when Cotton Mather was hanging witches. Or maybe Lafitte had a Creole girl who called on the Black Man in the pirate-haven of Barataria. The Gulf is full of ghosts and memories, and one of those ghosts might very well be that of a woman with warlock blood who'd come from Europe a long time ago, and died on the new continent.
And possibly her familiar didn't know the way home. There's not much room for magic in America now, but once there was room.
("Before I Wake ... ") ~ Henry Kuttner

America has much greatness left in her. ~ Rand Paul

I had never in my life been abused by whites, but I had already become as conditioned to their existence as though I had been the victim of a thousand lynchings. ~ Richard Wright

I don't mind the debates, they're good for America, but we shouldn't be out there attacking each other all the time. ~ William J. Clinton

Prince Maxon surveyed the room and found me. Our eye met for a moment, and he smiled. ~ Kiera Cass

For students who are in the most creative group in America to somehow be presumed to be narrow is just completely meshugga. ~ Gish Jen

America wasn't interested in the roots of house music because it was too black, it was too gay, it was all these things, and today it's made very sanitized and white. ~ Felix Buxton

There are almost no beautiful cities in America, though there are many beautiful parts of cities, and some sections that are glorious without being beautiful, like downtown Chicago. Cities are too big and too rich for beauty; they have outgrown themselves too many times. ~ Noel Perrin

There are compelling reasons to implement a true America First immigration plan, starting with border security. We are a land of immigrants. Immigration, with assimilation, has generally been good for America. ~ Niger Innis

Privilege is the right to remain silent when others can't. ~ Richie Norton

Art usually only makes the news in America when the subject is money. ~ Jerry Saltz

On the downside, to paraphrase Thom Yorke talking about the music business, we're still having to deal with the stench of the last fart of the dying corpse of this regressive vision that America is a white, middle-aged, male, conservative country. ~ Edward Norton

My whole career was launched in such sort of poptastic style with 'Kids In America', and I liked - and like - being poptastic. Songs big on melody, high on energy, lots of attitude ... what's wrong with that? ~ Kim Wilde

America, I think, is about poor people playing music and poor people sharing food and poor people dancing, even when everything else in their life is so desperate, and so dismal that it doesn't seem there should be any room for any music, any extra food, or any extra energy for dancing. And people can say that I'm wrong, that we're a puritanical people, an evangelical people, a selfish people, but I don't believe that. I don't want to believe that. ~ Nickolas Butler

Everything is possible in America, except the production of intelligence. ~ Mie Hansson

Whoever pushes America's sex button must be prepared for sirens and alarms. Whatever else we do in our lives will be drowned out by them. ~ Erica Jong

This isn't Soviet Russia. This is America we're talking about. For God's sake, this is New York City. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

We don't have a system that knocks on doors of every person in America. ~ Ted Cruz

In the United States in 1907, a book entitled Three Acres and Liberty seized the imagination of the reading public. The author, Bolton Hall, began by taking for granted the awkwardness of having to work for someone else, and so advised his readers that they could win their freedom by leaving their offices and factories and buying three acres apiece of inexpensive farmland in middle America. This acreage would soon enable them to grow enough food for a family of four and to build a simple but comfortable home, and best of all, relieve them of any need ever again to flatter or negotiate with colleagues and superiors. ~ Alain De Botton

Ben Farmer brings a legend to life in Evangeline, evoking with grace and panache the travails of the Acadians in mid-eighteenth century America from Nova Scotia to New Orleans. Farmer is a wonderful storyteller, and readers won't soon forget this tale of love and fortitude. Simply riveting. ~ Keith Donohue

But before a computer became an inanimate object, and before Mission Control landed in Houston; before Sputnik changed the course of history, and before the NACA became NASA; before the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka established that separate was in fact not equal, and before the poetry of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech rang out over the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Langley's West Computers were helping America dominate aeronautics, space research, and computer technology, carving out a place for themselves as female mathematicians who were also black, black mathematicians who were also female. ~ Margot Lee Shetterly

But, frankly, to try to create some sort of a religious standard in terms of who can come to America, we're a melting pot. And as long as people have positive and good intent, they ought to be able to come. ~ John Kasich

The reason America is a special nation is because it was founded by people who were first on their knees before they were on their feet. We are a nation rooted in our faith. ~ Mike Huckabee

The CIA has been at the root of every dirty little war America has fought in this century. The CIA and dollar diplomacy. ~ Stephen King

Sovereignty inheres in the right to issue money. And the American sovereignty belongs by right to the people, and their representatives in Congress have the right to issue money and to determine the value thereof. And 120 million, 120 million suckers have lamentably failed to insist on the observation of this quite decided law ... Now the point at which embezzlement of the nation's funds on the part of her officers becomes treason can probably be decided only by jurists, and not by hand-picked judges who support illegality. ~ Ezra Pound

Above the pyramid on the great seal of the United States it says in Latin: "God has favored our undertaking." God will not favor everything that we do. It is rather our duty to divine His will. ~ Lyndon B. Johnson