A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present (Howard Zinn)

This is clearly one of the most important books written in the USA. It was one of the first books i owned here in the USA, but interestingly, i wasn't able to finish reading it until now, 20 years later. Back then it depressed me too much. Now, having lived more, I find it comforting, especially Zinn's relentless hope, his persistence in finding the small but important stories of success and freedom in the middle of the morass of opression and inequality. How sad that he isn't around anymore.

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Quotes:

They would make fine servants. . . . With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want. (Columbus)

They had no iron, but they wore tiny gold ornaments in their ears. This was to have enormous consequences.

To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to deemphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves—unwittingly—to justify what was done.

My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is different: that we must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.

In the long run, the oppressor is also a victim. In the short run (and so far, human history has consisted only of short runs), the victims, themselves desperate and tainted with the culture that oppresses them, turn on other victims.

I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.

There is not a country in world history in which racism has been more important, for so long a time, as the United States.

Some Americans were clearly omitted from this circle of united interest drawn by the Declaration of Independence: Indians, black slaves, women.

It was just that women were beyond consideration as worthy of inclusion. They were politically invisible.

“I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing. . . . It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government. . . . God forbid that we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. . . . The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.” Thomas Jefferson

When economic interest is seen behind the political clauses of the Constitution, then the document becomes not simply the work of wise men trying to establish a decent and orderly society, but the work of certain groups trying to maintain their privileges, while giving just enough rights and liberties to enough of the people to ensure popular support.

Jackson’s 1814 treaty with the Creeks started something new and important. It granted Indians individual ownership of land, thus splitting Indian from Indian, breaking up communal landholding

Jackson began raids into Florida, arguing it was a sanctuary for escaped slaves and for marauding Indians. Florida, he said, was essential to the defense of the United States. It was that classic modern preface to a war of conquest.

If you look through high school textbooks and elementary school textbooks in American history you will find Jackson the frontiersman, soldier, democrat, man of the people—not Jackson the slaveholder, land speculator, executioner of dissident soldiers, exterminator of Indians.

The proper tactic had now been found. The Indians would not be “forced” to go West. But if they chose to stay they would have to abide by state laws, which destroyed their tribal and personal rights and made them subject to endless harassment and invasion by white settlers coveting their land. If they left, however, the federal government would give them financial support and promise them lands beyond the Mississippi.

The army was supposed to organize their trek, but it turned over its job to private contractors who charged the government as much as possible, gave the Indians as little as possible.

The United States government’s support of slavery was based on an overpowering practicality.

1896, Plessy v. Ferguson, when the Court ruled that a railroad could segregate black and white if the segregated facilities were equal

The North, it must be recalled, did not have to undergo a revolution in its thinking to accept the subordination of the Negro. When the Civil War ended, nineteen of the twenty-four northern states did not allow blacks to vote. By 1900, all the southern states, in new constitutions and new statutes, had written into law the disfranchisement and segregation of Negroes, and a New York Times editorial said: “Northern men . . . no longer denounce the suppression of the Negro vote. . . . The necessity of it under the supreme law of self-preservation is candidly recognized.”

The immigrants from Ireland, fleeing starvation there when the potato crop failed, were coming to America now, packed into old sailing ships. The stories of these ships differ only in detail from the accounts of the ships that earlier brought black slaves and later German, Italian, Russian immigrants.

They thought the war was profiting the new class of millionaires. They saw defective guns sold to the army by contractors, sand sold as sugar, rye sold as coffee, shop sweepings made into clothing and blankets, paper-soled shoes produced for soldiers at the front, navy ships made of rotting timbers, soldiers’ uniforms that fell apart in the rain.

The crisis was built into a system which was chaotic in its nature, in which only the very rich were secure. It was a system of periodic crisis—1837, 1857, 1873 (and later: 1893, 1907, 1919, 1929)—that wiped out small businesses and brought cold, hunger, and death to working people while the fortunes of the Astors, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Morgans, kept growing through war and peace, crisis and recovery.

When the great railroad strikes of 1877 were over, a hundred people were dead, a thousand people had gone to jail, 100,000 workers had gone on strike, and the strikes had roused into action countless unemployed in the cities. More than half the freight on the nation’s 75,000 miles of track had stopped running at the height of the strikes.

The first transcontinental railroad was built with blood, sweat, politics and thievery, out of the meeting of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads.

Thomas Edison promised New Jersey politicians $1,000 each in return for favorable legislation.

Very soon after the Fourteenth Amendment became law, the Supreme Court began to demolish it as a protection for blacks, and to develop it as a protection for corporations.

Control in modern times requires more than force, more than law. It requires that a population dangerously concentrated in cities and factories, whose lives are filled with cause for rebellion, be taught that all is right as it is. And so, the schools, the churches, the popular literature taught that to be rich was a sign of superiority, to be poor a sign of personal failure, and that the only way upward for a poor person was to climb into the ranks of the rich by extraordinary effort and extraordinary luck.

The supreme act of patriotism was war.

It has been charged that our conduct of the war has been cruel. Senators, it has been the reverse. . . . Senators must remember that we are not dealing with Americans or Europeans. We are dealing with Orientals.

Black workers in 1910 made one-third of the earnings of white workers.

In Spokane, Washington, in 1909, an ordinance was passed to stop street meetings, and an IWW organizer who insisted on speaking was arrested. Thousands of Wobblies marched into the center of town to speak. One by one they spoke and were arrested, until six hundred were in jail. Jail conditions were brutal, and several men died in their cells, but the IWW won the right to speak.

You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.
Joe Hill - Little Red Song Book

Ten million were to die on the battlefield; 20 million were to die of hunger and disease related to the war. And no one since that day has been able to show that the war brought any gain for humanity that would be worth one human life. (WWI)

I have been accused of obstructing the war. I admit it. Gentlemen, I abhor war. I would oppose war if I stood alone. . . . I have sympathy with the suffering, struggling people everywhere. It does not make any difference under what flag they were born, or where they live. . . . Eugene Debbs

Former President Calvin Coolidge commented with his customary wisdom: “When more and more people are thrown out of work, unemployment results.” He spoke again in early 1931, “This country is not in good condition.”

The New Deal gave federal money to put thousands of writers, artists, actors, and musicians to work—in a Federal Theatre Project, a Federal Writers Project, a Federal Art Project: murals were painted on public buildings; plays were put on for working-class audiences who had never seen a play; hundreds of books and pamphlets were written and published. People heard a symphony for the first time. It was an exciting flowering of arts for the people, such as had never happened before in American history, and which has not been duplicated since.

When the New Deal was over, capitalism remained intact. The rich still controlled the nation’s wealth, as well as its laws, courts, police, newspapers, churches, colleges. Enough help had been given to enough people to make Roosevelt a hero to millions, but the same system that had brought depression and crisis—the system of waste, of inequality, of concern for profit over human need—remained.

“We, the governments of Great Britain and the United States, in the name of India, Burma, Malaya, Australia, British East Africa, British Guiana, Hongkong, Siam, Singapore, Egypt, Palestine, Canada, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, as well as Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, Hawaii, Alaska, and the Virgin Islands, hereby declare most emphatically, that this is not an imperialist war.”
Thus went a skit put on in the United States in the year 1939 by the Communist party.

When John F. Kennedy took office, he launched the Alliance for Progress, a program of help for Latin America, emphasizing social reform to better the lives of people. But it turned out to be mostly military aid to keep in power right-wing dictatorships and enable them to stave off revolutions.

The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, plus the set of laws passed in the late 1860s and early 1870s, gave the President enough authority to wipe out racial discrimination. The Constitution demanded that the President execute the laws, but no President had used that power.

Martin Luther King’s speech there thrilled 200,000 black and white Americans—“I have a dream. ...” It was magnificent oratory, but without the anger that many blacks felt. [...] Eighteen days after the Washington gathering, almost as if in deliberate contempt for its moderation, a bomb exploded in the basement of a black church in Birmingham and four girls attending a Sunday school class were killed.

The civil rights bills emphasized voting, but voting was not a fundamental solution to racism or poverty. In Harlem, blacks who had voted for years still lived in rat-infested slums. [...] It seemed clear by now that the nonviolence of the southern movement, perhaps tactically necessary in the southern atmosphere, and effective because it could be used to appeal to national opinion against the segregationist South, was not enough to deal with the entrenched problems of poverty in the black ghetto. [...] Martin Luther King himself became more and more concerned about problems untouched by civil rights laws—problems coming out of poverty.

The use of busing to integrate schools—sponsored by the government and the courts in response to the black movement—was an ingenious concession to protest. It had the effect of pushing poor whites and poor blacks into competition for the miserable inadequate schools which the system provided for all the poor.

When the United States fought in Vietnam, it was organized modern technology versus organized human beings, and the human beings won.

By the end of the Vietnam war, 7 million tons of bombs had been dropped on Vietnam, more than twice the total bombs dropped on Europe and Asia in World War II—almost one 500-pound bomb for every human being in Vietnam. [...] Colonel Oran Henderson, who had been charged with covering up the My Lai killings, told reporters in early 1971: “Every unit of brigade size has its My Lai hidden someplace.”

Yes, we burn all rice and shoot all livestock.

Traditional history portrays the end of wars as coming from the initiatives of leaders—negotiations in Paris or Brussels or Geneva or Versailles—just as it often finds the coming of war a response to the demand of “the people.” The Vietnam war gave clear evidence that at least for that war (making one wonder about the others) the political leaders were the last to take steps to end the war—“the people” were far ahead.

WITCH (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell)
NOW (National Organization for Women)

Male doctors used instruments to bring out children, replacing the sensitive hands of midwives, in the era of “anesthetized, technologized childbirth.” Rich disagreed with her fellow feminist Firestone, who wanted to change the biological inevitability of childbirth, because it is painful and a source of subordination; she wanted, under different social conditions, to make childbirth a source of physical and emotional joy. [...] Could women liberating themselves, children freeing themselves, men and women beginning to understand one another, find the source of their common oppression outside rather than in one another?

The prison had arisen in the United States as an attempt at Quaker reform, to replace mutilation, hanging, exile—the traditional punishments during colonial times. The prison was intended, through isolation, to produce repentence and salvation, but prisoners went insane and died in that isolation. [...]
The prisons in the United States had long been an extreme reflection of the American system itself: the stark life differences between rich and poor, the racism, the use of victims against one another, the lack of resources of the underclass to speak out, the endless “reforms” that changed little.

Julien noted that Nixon’s Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, would remain at his post—in other words, that Nixon’s foreign policy would continue. “That is to say,” Julien wrote, “that Washington will continue to support General Pinochet in Chile, General Geisel in Brazil, General Stroessner in Paraguay, etc. . . .”

“The President of the United States isn’t going to solve our problems. The problems are too big.”

It was a rare journalist bold enough to point out, as Alan Richman of the Boston Globe did when the fifty-two hostages were released alive and apparently well, that there was a certain lack of proportion in American reactions to this and other violations of human rights

Reagan’s victory, followed eight years later by the election of George Bush, meant that another part of the Establishment, lacking even the faint liberalism of the Carter presidency, would be in charge. The policies would be more crass—cutting benefits to poor people, lowering taxes for the wealthy, increasing the military budget, filling the federal court system with conservative judges, actively working to destroy revolutionary movements in the Caribbean.

Justices William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall were the last of the Court’s liberals.

Statistics showed that the armed forces of the world were responsible for two-thirds of the gases that depleted the ozone layer.

In a two-party system, if both parties ignore public opinion, there is no place voters can turn.

“the general effect of cold war extremism was to delay rather than hasten the great change that overtook the Soviet Union by the end of the 1980s.” (former ambassador to the Soviet Union George Kennan)

Along with the exultation “We have won the cold war” came a kind of panic: “What can we do to maintain our military establishment?”

“I want to scare the hell out of the rest of the world. I don’t say that in a bellicose way.” (Colin Powell)

President George Bush was satisfied. As the war ended, he declared on a radio broadcast: “The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian peninsula.”

Clearly, there was something amiss with a political system, supposed to be democratic, in which the desires of the voters were repeatedly ignored. They could be ignored with impunity so long as the political system was dominated by two parties, both tied to corporate wealth.
That illness came from a fact which was almost never talked about: that the United States was a class society, in which 1 percent of the population owned 33 percent of the wealth, with an underclass of 30 to 40 million people living in poverty.
While the Democrats would give more help to the poor than the Republicans, they were not capable (indeed, not really desirous) of seriously tampering with an economic system in which corporate profit comes before human need.

After the disintegration of the Soviet bloc began in 1989, there had been talk in the United States of a “peace dividend,” the opportunity to take billions of dollars from the military budget and use it for human needs. The war in the Gulf became a convenient excuse for the government determined to stop such talk. A member of the Bush administration said: “We owe Saddam a favor. He saved us from the peace dividend”

As for the subtitle of this book, it is not quite accurate; a “people’s history” promises more than any one person can fulfill, and it is the most difficult kind of history to recapture. I call it that anyway because, with all its limitations, it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people’s movements of resistance.

They teach us that the supreme act of citizenship is to choose among saviors, by going into a voting booth every four years to choose between two white and well-off Anglo-Saxon males of inoffensive personality and orthodox opinions.
The idea of saviors has been built into the entire culture, beyond politics. We have learned to look to stars, leaders, experts in every field, thus surrendering our own strength, demeaning our own ability, obliterating our own selves. But from time to time, Americans reject that idea and rebel.

The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history.

To recall this is to remind people of what the Establishment would like them to forget—the enormous capacity of apparently helpless people to resist, of apparently contented people to demand change. [...]
To uncover such history is to find a powerful human impulse to assert one’s humanity. It is to hold out, even in times of deep pessimism, the possibility of surprise.

Capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes. It is now beginning to fail for the middle classes.

“If God had intended us to vote, he would have given us candidates.” (bumper sticker on Clinton vs Gore election)

Columnist Molly Ivins suggested that the bombing of Baghdad for the purpose of “sending a powerful message” fit the definition of terrorism.

The militarization of the nation—the huge military budgets, the maintenance of armed forces all over the world, the repeated use of weapons against other countries—meant that the resources available for human needs were not available.

Dwight Eisenhower had said: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in a final sense a theft from those who are hungry and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.”

The United States was the richest country in the world, with 5 percent of the earth’s population yet consuming 30 percent of what was produced worldwide. But only a tiny portion of the American population benefited

Instead of giving out contracts for jet bombers and nuclear submarines, contracts could be offered to nonprofit corporations to hire people to build homes, construct public transport systems, clean up the rivers and lakes, turn our cities into decent places to live.

Certainly, if historical experience had any meaning, the future of peace and justice in America could not depend on the good will of government. The democratic principle, enunciated in the words of the Declaration of Independence, declared that government was secondary, that the people who established it were primary. Thus, the future of democracy depended on the people, and their growing consciousness of what was the decent way to relate to their fellow human beings all over the world.

The Curse of Capistrano (The Mark of the Zorro) (Johnston McCulley)

First time read. I got a kick out of how much of this stuff is echoed in The Princess Bride. One hombre, his blade, his honor and his senorita.

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Quotes:

Sergeant Gonzales realized then that he had been angry, and he knew an angry man cannot fight with the blade as well as a man who controls his temper. So he became deadly cold now, and his eyes narrowed, and all boasting was gone from him.

“It will be rather a bore, I expect. Love and marriage, and all that sort of thing, is rather a necessary nuisance in its way. The idea of a man of sense running about a woman, playing a guitar for her, making up to her like a loon when everyone knows his intention! And then the ceremony! Being a man of wealth and station, I suppose the wedding must be an elaborate one, and the natives will have to be feasted, and all that, simply because a man is taking a bride to be mistress of his household.” (Don Diego)

Don Carlos had proved himself to be a courageous man in his youth, and now he was a wise man, also, and hence he knew better than to participate in an argument between women.

Your beauty would hinge a man’s tongue in its middle so that both ends might be free to sing your praises.

She was fighting a mental battle, was Senorita Lolita. On the one side was wealth and position, and the safety and good fortune of her parents-and a lifeless man for husband; and on the other side was the romance and ideal love she craved. Until the last hope was gone she could not give the latter up.

Even if a caballero went to his death, it was all right so long as he believed he was doing the proper thing, and died as a caballero should.

Like the tongue of a serpent, Senor Zorro’s blade shot in. Thrice it darted forward, and upon the fair brow of Ramon, just between the eyes, there flamed suddenly a red, bloody letter Z.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Mark Twain)

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Quotes:

his face lit up with a glow of gratitude that was prayer, though he did not know it

A robber is more high-toned than what a pirate is--as a general thing. In most countries they're awful high up in the nobility--dukes and such.

The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne)

This story of temptation and survival is told so expertly between the lines, that everything important is never actually written. Nevertheless, the reader has no problem understanding what's happening and picking sides. Hawthorne is able to express a thoroughly modern point of view without deviating from the language of Puritanism, but subverting it from within.

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Quotes:

Be it accepted as a proof that all was not corrupt in this poor victim of her own frailty, and man’s hard law, that Hester Prynne yet struggled to believe that no fellow-mortal was guilty like herself.

Pearl was a born outcast of the infantile world. An imp of evil, emblem and product of sin, she had no right among christened infants.

Trusting no man as his friend, he could not recognize his enemy when the latter actually appeared.

the freedom of a broken law

It must have been a work of vast ability in the somniferous school of literature.

Had a man seen old Roger Chillingworth, at that moment of his ecstasy, he would have had no need to ask how Satan comports himself, when a precious human soul is lost to heaven, and won into his kingdom. But what distinguished the physician’s ecstasy from Satan’s was the trait of wonder in it!

It kept him down, on a level with the lowest; him, the man of ethereal attributes, whose voice the angels might else have listened to and answered! But this very burden it was, that gave him sympathies so intimate with the sinful brotherhood of mankind; so that his heart vibrated in unison with theirs, and received their pain into itself, and sent its own throb of pain through a thousand other hearts, in gushes of sad, persuasive eloquence.

Little accustomed, in her long seclusion from society, to measure her ideas of right and wrong by any standard external to herself, Hester saw or seemed to see that there lay a responsibility upon her, in reference to the clergyman, which she owed to no other, nor to the whole world besides.

It is to the credit of human nature, that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates.

The letter was the symbol of her calling. Such helpfulness was found in her,so much power to do, and power to sympathize,that many people refused to interpret the scarlet A by its original signification. They said that it meant Able; so strong was Hester Prynne, with a woman’s strength.

Indeed, the same dark question often rose into her mind, with reference to the whole race of womanhood. Was existence worth accepting, even to the happiest among them? [...] As a first step, the whole system of society is to be torn down, and built up anew. Then, the very nature of the opposite sex, or its long hereditary habit, which has become like nature, is to be essentially modified, before woman can be allowed to assume what seems a fair and suitable position. Finally, all other difficulties being obviated, woman cannot take advantage of these preliminary reforms, until she herself shall have undergone a still mightier change.

It lies not in the pleasure of the magistrates to take off this badge, calmly replied Hester. Were I worthy to be quit of it, it would fall away of its own nature, or be transformed into something that should speak a different purport.

Roger Chillingworth was a striking evidence of man’s faculty of transforming himself into a devil, if he will only, for a reasonable space of time, undertake a devil’s office.

You wrong yourself in this, said Hester, gently. You have deeply and sorely repented. Your sin is left behind you, in the days long past. Your present life is not less holy, in very truth, than it seems in people’s eyes.

We are not, Hester, the worst sinners in the world.

Heaven would show mercy, rejoined Hester, hadst thou but the strength to take advantage of it.

Their immediate posterity, the generation next to the early emigrants, wore the blackest shade of Puritanism, and so darkened the national visage with it, that all the subsequent years have not sufficed to clear it up. We have yet to learn again the forgotten art of gayety.

As was usually the case wherever Hester stood, a small vacant area a sort of magic circle had formed itself about her, into which, though the people were elbowing one another at a little distance, none ventured, or felt disposed to intrude.

as her tears fell upon her father’s cheek, they were the pledge that she would grow up amid human joy and sorrow, nor forever do battle with the world, but be a woman in it

Among many morals which press upon us from the poor minister’s miserable experience, we put only this into a sentence: Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!

It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom.

She assured them, too, of her firm belief, that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven’s own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness.

Autobiography of Mark Twain - vol 1

Rambling, unedited, too long, and altogether perfect, this is a must-have for Mark Twain fans. I can't wait for the next volume to be out (it's supposed to be 3). Published by the Mark Twain project, this is the untouched text of the memories Mark Twain dictated over his final years of life, with the instructions that they weren't to be released until 100 years after his death. This gimmick allowed him to be brutally honest, without fear of offending people who would be long dead before the book came out.

What came out is not surprising, to anyone who has read his other autobiographical works, except for a few moments of near-mad sanity, as when in his strong opposition to the war in the Phillipines, he calls the American troops murderers (describing some of the atrocities committed then).

If you like Mark Twain, and if you're going to read only one book this year, make this the one.

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Quotes:

We were always going to be rich next year—no occasion to work. It is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life rich—these are wholesome; but to begin it prospectively rich! The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it.

The North thinks it knows how to make corn bread, but this is gross superstition.

It seems a pity that the world should throw away so many good things merely because they are unwholesome.

For we were little Christian children, and had early been taught the value of forbidden fruit.

We were comrades, and yet not comrades; color and condition interposed a subtle line which both parties were conscious of

In my schoolboy days I had no aversion to slavery. I was not aware that there was anything wrong about it. No one arraigned it in my hearing; the local papers said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing, and that the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind—and then the texts were read aloud to us to make the matter sure; if the slaves themselves had an aversion to slavery they were wise and said nothing.

“Poor thing, when he sings, it shows that he is not remembering, and that comforts me; but when he is still, I am afraid he is thinking, and I cannot bear it. He will never see his mother again; if he can sing, I must not hinder it, but be thankful for it. If you were older, you would understand me; then that friendless child’s noise would make you glad.”

life does not consist mainly—or even largely—of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever blowing through one’s head

I am confident that by that time the nation, encountering the Morris incident in my autobiography, would be trying to remember what the incident was, and not succeeding. That incident, which is so large to-day, will be so small three or four months from now it will then have taken its place with the abortive Russian revolution and these other large matters, and nobody will be able to tell one from the other by difference of size.

Thanksgiving Day, a function which originated in New England two or three centuries ago when those people recognized that they really had something to be thankful for—annually, not oftener—if they had succeeded in exterminating their neighbors, the Indians, during the previous twelve months instead of getting exterminated by their neighbors the Indians. Thanksgiving Day became a habit, for the reason that in the course of time, as the years drifted on, it was perceived that the exterminating had ceased to be mutual and was all on the white man’s side, consequently on the Lord’s side, consequently it was proper to thank the Lord for it and extend the usual annual compliments. The original reason for a Thanksgiving Day has long ago ceased to exist—the Indians have long ago been comprehensively and satisfactorily exterminated and the account closed with Heaven, with the thanks due. But, from old habit, Thanksgiving Day has remained with us, and every year the President of the United States and the Governors of all the several States and the territories set themselves the task, every November, to advertise for something to be thankful for, and then they put those thanks into a few crisp and reverent phrases, in the form of a Proclamation, and this is read from all the pulpits in the land, the national conscience is wiped clean with one swipe, and sin is resumed at the old stand.

[T]here are two separate and distinct kinds of Christian morals, so separate, so distinct, so unrelated that they are no more kin to each other than are archangels and politicians. The one kind is Christian private morals, the other is Christian public morals

I could not really complain, because he had only given me his word of honor as security; I ought to have required of him something substantial.

I was always handsome. Anybody but a critic could have seen it.

Jay Gould was the mightiest disaster which has ever befallen this country. The people had desired money before his day, but he taught them to fall down and worship it.

John D. Rockefeller is quite evidently a sincere man. Satan, twaddling sentimental sillinesses to a Sunday-school, could be no burlesque upon John D. Rockefeller and his performances in his Cleveland Sunday-school.

“What was he born for? What was his father born for? What was I born for? What is anybody born for?” [...] His father was a poet, but was doomed to grind out his living in a most uncongenial occupation—the editing of a daily political newspaper. He was a singing bird in a menagerie of monkeys, macaws, and hyenas. His life was wasted. [...] “What was he born for? What was the use of it?” These tiresome and monotonous repetitions of the human life—where is their value?

We are always more anxious to be distinguished for a talent which we do not possess than to be praised for the fifteen which we do possess.

Persons who think there is no such thing as luck—good or bad—are entitled to their opinion, although I think they ought to be shot for it.

Honored Sir: Your patriotic virtues have won for you the homage of half the nation and the enmity of the other half. This places your character as a citizen upon a summit as high as Washington’s. The verdict is unanimous and unassailable. The votes of both sides are necessary in cases like these, and the votes of the one side are quite as valuable as are the votes of the other. Where the votes are all in a public man’s favor the verdict is against him. It is sand, and history will wash it away. But the verdict for you is rock, and will stand.

[Roosevelt] knew perfectly well that to pen six hundred helpless and weaponless savages in a hole like rats in a trap and massacre them in detail during a stretch of a day and a half, from a safe position on the heights above, was no brilliant feat of arms—and would not have been a brilliant feat of arms even if Christian America, represented by its salaried soldiers, had shot them down with Bibles and the Golden Rule instead of bullets.

I have been listening to what has been said about citizenship. You complain of the police. You created the police. You are responsible for the police. They must reflect you

The entire nation laughs, yet in its innocent dulness never suspects that it is laughing at itself. But that is what it is doing.

I prefer good taste to righteousness.

I am sure I know more about lying than anybody who has lived on this planet before me. [...] I know all about audiences, they believe everything you say, except when you are telling the truth.

Twice the bills were accompanied by offensive letters from the Secretary. These I answered profanely.

How childish it all seems now! And how brutal—that I could not be moved to confer upon my wife a precious and lasting joy because it would cause me a small inconvenience.

That Bible Class is so uninured to anything resembling either truth or sense that I think a clean straight truth falling in its midst would make as much havoc as a bombshell.

I should talk to the stenographer two hours a day for a hundred years, I should still never be able to set down a tenth part of the things which have interested me in my lifetime.

It was during my first year’s apprenticeship in the Courier office that I did a thing which I have been trying to regret for fifty-five years.

I told him what I believed to be true—that the McKinleys and the Roosevelts and the multimillionaire disciples of Jay Gould—that man who in his brief life rotted the commercial morals of this nation and left them stinking when he died—have quite completely transformed our people from a nation with pretty high and respectable ideals to just the opposite of that; that our people have no ideals now that are worthy of consideration; that our Christianity which we have always been so proud of—not to say so vain of—is now nothing but a shell, a sham, a hypocrisy; that we have lost our ancient sympathy with oppressed peoples struggling for life and liberty; that when we are not coldly indifferent to such things we sneer at them, and that the sneer is about the only expression the newspapers and the nation deal in with regard to such things.

Some of us, even the whiteheaded, may live to see the blessed day when Czars and Grand Dukes will be as scarce there as I trust they are in heaven.

I have made it a rule never to smoke more than one cigar at a time. I have no other restriction as regards smoking.

I have lived a severely moral life. But it would be a mistake for other people to try that, or for me to recommend it.

American Gods (Neil Gaiman)

Like in Neverwhere, here we have another human, flawed hero who gets plunged into a world beyond his wildest imaginations, where the only resource he has to succeed is his basic decency, a sense of morality that goes a little deeper than convention. Unlike Neverwhere, this novel is of course set in the USA. Although many of the themes in the book are universal, it's still impressive how he was able to deal with American mythology (and spirituality?) like a pro, like a native.

If Neverwhere was about the London underneath, this would be about the America between, and on-top-of, and around. It’s an America with strange mythic depths. Ones that can hurt you. Or kill you. Or make you mad. -- Neil Gaiman

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Quotes:

When people tell you there’s something wrong with a story, they’re almost always right. When they tell what it is that’s wrong and how it can be fixed, they’re almost always wrong. Neil Gaiman - blog

I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen — I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it. (Sam Black Crow)

The best thing—in Shadow’s opinion, perhaps the only good thing—about being in prison was a feeling of relief. The feeling that he’d plunged as low as he could plunge and he’d hit bottom. He didn’t worry that the man was going to get him, because the man had got him. He was no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring, because yesterday had brought it.

“I brought you mead to drink because it’s traditional. And right now we need all the tradition we can get. It seals our bargain.” [...] “There,” said Mr. Wednesday. “You’re my man, now.”

“Tell him that we have fucking reprogrammed reality. Tell him that language is a virus and that religion is an operating system and that prayers are just so much fucking spam. Tell him that or I’ll fucking kill you,” said the young man mildly, from the smoke.

“Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.” (Wednesday)

“I feel,” Shadow told her, “like I’m in a world with its own sense of logic. Its own rules. Like when you’re in a dream, and you know there are rules you mustn’t break. Even if you don’t know what they mean. I’m just going along with it, you know?”

The important thing to understand about American history, wrote Mr. Ibis, in his leather-bound journal, is that it is fictional, a charcoal-sketched simplicity for the children, or the easily bored. For the most part it is uninspected, unimagined, unthought, a representation of the thing, and not the thing itself. It is a fine fiction, he continued, pausing for a moment to dip his pen in the inkwell and collect his thoughts, that America was founded by pilgrims, seeking the freedom to believe as they wished, that they came to the Americas, spread and bred and filled the empty land. [...] In truth, the American colonies were as much a dumping ground as an escape, a forgetting place.

No, in the USA, people still get the call, or some of them, and they feel themselves being called to from the transcendent void, and they respond to it by building a model out of beer bottles of somewhere they’ve never visited, or by erecting a gigantic bat house in some part of the country that bats have traditionally declined to visit. Roadside attractions: people feel themselves being pulled to places where, in other parts of the world, they would recognize that part of themselves that is truly transcendent, and buy a hot dog and walk around, feeling satisfied on a level they cannot truly describe, and profoundly dissatisfied on a level beneath that. (Wednesday)

“Let me tell you somethin’,” said Mr. Nancy. “It can be a long time between meals. Someone offers you food, you say yes. I’m no longer young as I was, but I can tell you this, you never say no to the opportunity to piss, to eat, or to get half an hour’s shut-eye. You follow me?”

What should I believe? thought Shadow, and the voice came back to him from somewhere deep beneath the world, in a bass rumble: Believe everything. (Shadow and Buffalo Man)

“We have, let us face it and admit it, little influence. We prey on them, and we take from them, and we get by; we strip and we whore and we drink too much; we pump gas and we steal and we cheat and we exist in the cracks at the edges of society. Old gods, here in this new land without gods. [...] Now, as all of you will have had reason aplenty to discover for yourselves, there are new gods growing in America, clinging to growing knots of belief: gods of credit card and freeway, of Internet and telephone, of radio and hospital and television, gods of plastic and of beeper and of neon. Proud gods, fat and foolish creatures, puffed up with their own newness and importance.” (Wednesday)

“You shine like a beacon in a dark world.” (Laura)

“Say ‘Nevermore,’ “ said Shadow. “Fuck you,” said the raven.

It occurred to him that the reason he liked Wednesday and Mr. Nancy and the rest of them better than their opposition was pretty straightforward: they might be dirty, and cheap, and their food might taste like shit, but at least they didn’t speak in clichés.

Minus forty, maybe, that strange point on the thermometer when Celsius and Fahrenheit say the same thing.

This was not simply cold: this was science fiction.

This was beyond a joke. This had moved beyond foolishness, slipped over the line into genuine twenty-four-karat Jesus-Christ-I-screwed-up-big-time territory.

He did not touch Wednesday. He did not say anything. Later, he wondered if he could have changed things, if that gesture would have done any good, if it could have averted any of the harm that was to come. He told himself it wouldn’t. He knew it wouldn’t. But still, afterward, he wished that, just for a moment on that slow flight home, he had touched Wednesday’s hand.

“It’s a holy place,” said Wednesday. “That’s the American Way—they need to give people an excuse to come and worship.

“Where are we?” “Behind the scenes,” said Wednesday.

“This isn’t about what is,” said Mr. Nancy. “It’s about what people think is. It’s all imaginary anyway. That’s why it’s important. People only fight over imaginary things.”

“Media. I think I have heard of her. Isn’t she the one who killed her children?”

“In the god business,” said the figure—and now Shadow was certain it was Wednesday, nobody else had that rasp, that deep cynical joy in words, “it’s not the death that matters. It’s the opportunity for resurrection.

“There was only one guy in the whole Bible Jesus ever personally promised a place with him in Paradise. Not Peter, not Paul, not any of those guys. He was a convicted thief, being executed. So don’t knock the guys on death row. Maybe they know something you don’t.”

They drove on in silence. Shadow felt that he’d made a decision; something big and strange. [...] It wouldn’t have mattered if he hadn’t wanted to live, but he did want to live, and that made all the difference. He hoped he would live though this, but he was willing to die, if that was what it took to be alive.

“It doesn’t matter that you didn’t believe in us,” said Mr. Ibis. “We believed in you.”

Mr. Jacquel opened the last door for Shadow, and behind that door there was nothing. Not darkness. Not even oblivion. Only nothing. [...] Shadow accepted it, completely and without reservation, and he walked through the door into nothing with a strange fierce joy.

“Gods are great,” said Atsula, slowly, as if she were imparting a great secret. “But the heart is greater. For it is from our hearts they come, and to our hearts they shall return . . .”

Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you—even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers, and triumphs over all opposition. [...] Religions are places to stand and look and act, vantage points from which to view the world.

Even Nothing cannot last forever.

Shadow shook his head. “You know,” he said. “I think I would rather be a man than a god. We don’t need anyone to believe in us. We just keep going anyhow. It’s what we do.”