Related:

• Americans are people who insist on living in the present, tense.
• David Letterman's "Things we can be proud of as America
• The ability to say no is one of the greatest gifts any parent can have.
  Well, unless you count the ability to stay with this position in spite of all the requests that are made for reconsideration....
• Rituals and ceremonies help define a culture. Without them, societies or groups of people have a diminished sense of who they are.
• We owe almost all our knowledge not to people who have agreed, but to people who have disagreed.
• Education has in America's whole history been the major hope for improving the individual and society.
  -- Gunnar Myrdal...
• Americans' greatest fear is that America will turn out to have been a phenomenon, not a civilization.
  -- Shirley Hazzard, "Transit of Venu...