American Quotes

Anyone who said he wasn't afraid during the civil rights movement was either a liar or without imagination. I was scared all the time. My hands didn't shake but inside I was shaking.

The Sunday School teacher talked too much in the way our grade school teacher used to when she told us about George Washington. Pleasant, pretty stories, but not true.

It puzzled me that other people hadn't found out, too. God was gone. We were younger. We had reached past him. Why couldn't they see it? It still puzzles me.

I think God just died of old age. And, when I realized that he wasn't any more, it didn't shock me. It seemed natural and right!

I just knew that God wasn't there. He was a man on a throne in Heaven, so he was easy to forget.

I didn't think then, and I still don't, that I was actually sick.

I couldn't get that same feeling during the day, with my hands in dirty dish water and the hard sun showing up the dirtiness on the roof tops. And after a time, even at night, the feeling of God didn't last.

But I was sure of one thing. If God were a father, with children, that cleanliness I had been feeling wasn't God.

There comes a point when a dream becomes reality and reality becomes a dream.

The more people pointed at me in scorn the more stubborn I got and when they began calling me the Bad Girl of West Seattle High, I tried to live up to it.

That satisfied me until I began to figure that if God loved all his children equally, why did he bother about my red hat and let other people lose their fathers and mothers for always?

I used to lie between cool, clean sheets at night after I'd had a bath, after I had washed my hair and scrubbed my knuckles and finger-nails and teeth. Then I could lie quite still in the dark with my face to the window with the trees in it, and talk to God.

If a person is treated like a patient, they are apt to act like one.

I went to Sunday School and liked the stories about Christ and the Christmas star. They were beautiful. They made you warm and happy to think about. But I didn't believe them.

I have learned that to have a good friend is the purest of all God's gifts, for it is a love that has no exchange of payment.

I wondered a little why God was such a useless thing. It seemed a waste of time to have him. After that he became less and less, until he was... nothingness.

Progress in civilization has been accompanied by progress in cookery.

I certainly feel that the time is not far distant when a knowledge of the principles of diet will be an essential part of one's education. Then mankind will eat to live, be able to do better mental and physical work and disease will be less frequent.

You have this enormous network and no one knows what's out there.

When I'm not supposed to do something, it becomes more attractive to me.

What is right, what is wrong, how can anyone say? I view very, very, few things as Right with a capital R.

The whole idea that what is not normal should be kept secret - that's really distasteful to me.

Silicon Valley is constantly saying that the government is irrelevant and powerless. But that's because most people there have never seen it get serious.

Napster was predicating its business model on violation of copyright.

If you don't want to deal with them, fine. But don't hamper other people from dealing with them.

I'm bisexual.

I was interested in implements of mass destruction - from an academic point of view.

I was fairly solitary. I didn't like structured learning. People didn't seem to be my cup of tea.

I can write a program that lets you break the copy protection on a music file. But I can't write a program that solders new connections onto a chip for you.

Even if the music industry simply gave away all their music people would complain that they don't have the bandwidth to download all the stuff - the problem would merely shift from availability to distribution.