Country Quotes - Page 559

The most important thing I learned as a foreign correspondent in about 80 countries is that it takes a very shallow knowledge of history to think that there are solutions to most problems.

Still, no one finally knows what a poet is supposed either to be or to do. Especially in this country, one takes on the job—because all that one does in America is considered a "job"—with no clear sense as to what is required or where one will ultimately be led. In that respect, it is as particular an instance of a "calling" as one might point to. For years I've kept in mind, "Many are called but few are chosen." Even so "called," there were no assurances that one would be answered.

I was trying to learn about Lyndon Johnson when he was young and creating his first political machine in the Texas hill country. I moved there for three years. You had to learn that world

To engage in war is always to pick a wild card. And war must always be a last resort, not a first choice. I truly must question the judgment of any president who can say that a massive unprovoked military attack on a nation which is over 50 percent children is ‘in the highest moral traditions of our country.'

In 1776, at the point of severance, except for an infusion of words from east coast Indian languages, the English language of North America was not in any radical way dissimilar from that of what the American settlers called the mother country.

O woman-country! wooed not wed, Loved all the more by earth's male-lands, Laid to their hearts instead.

I would always argue to my students that Canada is not necessarily or inherently a left-wing country, and the United States is not necessarily the citadel of right-wing liberty. The obvious case there is Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, which made the Americans much further left than the Canadians at the time, and Americans coming to Canada found us backward, conservative, and out of tune with the kind of free-spirited liberalism that there was in the States. Then things reversed, with medicare the prime example.

We like to say medicare is uniquely Canadian, but Americans have Medicare too. Even the name. I can't actually determine where the name started, except that it appeared in the two countries at about the same time. Had the Vietnam War not occurred, the Americans would have had a Medicare system much like ours.

There is probably not more than one hundred dollars in cash in circulation today. That is, if you were to call in all the bills and silver and gold in the country at noon tomorrow and pile them on the table, you would find that you had just about one hundred dollars, with perhaps several Canadian pennies and a few peppermint Life Savers.

The first suicide bombing that entered my consciousness was the Beirut embassy bombing. It was very personal. I'd been in the embassy and I knew most of the people in the station who were killed in the bombing. So you take the personal aspect of it and the mystery of who the bomber was and the fact that a small group of people could drive us out of a country that was absolutely key to the United States, and what was behind this... The fact that they've been able to hide the embassy bombers' identities for all these years tells me we're up against a very capable movement.

The gloomy recess of an ecclesiastical library is like a harbor, into which a far-traveling curiosity has sailed with its freight, and cast anchor. The ponderous tomes are bales of the mind's merchandise. Odors of distant countries and times steal from the red leaves, the swelling ridges of vellum, and the titles in tarnished gold.

In a foreign country it is far from easy to study a scene at length when you know that at any minute someone may appear and ask what you are doing and that you can't answer, and you haven't many references, and you don't know the law. Neither is it easy to find and know the subjects for portraits or comfortable to make such picture when you cannot apply an anesthesia of small talk.

If you're an Indian, you could be very anxious about some of the Supreme Court's decisions, some of the decisions of policy makers, so maybe a little bit of irony there. But I think our "Savage Anxieties," when I titled the book, I really wanted to focus people on the challenge that tribes in this country, as well as indigenous peoples around the world, are confronting Western civilization with.

I think, some countries, you have to be dead to have your picture on a stamp.

There's a thing that has happened in the U.S. where the spirit has been beaten so badly and so you feel no unity in the voice of the country.

Instead of focusing on growing jobs and reigniting our economy, President Obama focused on growing government and tried to remake the United States into the image of the debt-laden countries of Europe. His approach has been more spending, more regulation, and higher taxes.

Mitt Romney is talking about the fact that Republicans and Democrats alike have to find common ground to address very real challenges we face as a country. It's a message that's uplifting, it's optimistic. It's about how America can be great again. I think that's the right closing message and I think frankly it's what we need to do as a country after this election regardless of what happens.

Our folks have a lot of passion. They're very concerned about the direction of the country and concerned the record debt and deficit and what it means for their kids, concerned about the economy and the fact that we're not getting back on track with the weakest economic recovery since the Great Depression. And at the end of the day, I think that's going to make the difference.

I am a man who used to wear the tights. We traveled the country doing two Shakespeare plays for bored college students for about a year. I think I'd probably still be doing it now if I hadn't just randomly decided to go to a sketch group audition. That led to doing improv, which led to the Daily Show. But it was fun while it lasted.

The first year or so on The Daily Show is pretty intense in terms of travel. You're going to the worst places in the country, talking to the craziest people in the world.

If you cannot make moving pictures about yourself, your country and your culture, it's as if you do not exist anymore in this world of images we live in. Because now when we all switch on our smartphones or our iPads or our computers, it's all image and sound. All people and cultures must work to secure their place in the digital space. Cinema is also political in this way.

I get a lot of return business. I think it's all those years I put in traveling around the country; people saw me before and had a good time so they want to see me again.

The goal of Latin American unity is highly ephemeral. Each country has its own set of goals and very different sets of leaders.

I consider myself to be blessed. I have a family that is a mix of different religions and different ethnicities. I hope everyone can look beyond the bikini or beyond the whole beauty pageant stereotype of Miss USA, and realize that what I'm doing is more significant than just that. It represents the United States as a country of opportunity, where you can do anything you want to, and ethnicity and religion cannot stop you.

Racism in our countries is a fact in that the indian is not allowed to be a politician or aspire to being head of state. It has reached the point that 99% of the indigenous women have not gone to school. The indigenous are condemned to live in a situation designed to exterminate them. They receive a pittance of a salary, they neither speak nor write the language, politics dictates their situation. Is this slavery? I don't know what it's called. It is not the same as before because we are in modern times.