" The restlessness of the American experience lends to money a greater power than it enjoys in less mobile societies. Not that money doesn't occupy a high place in England, India or the Soviet Union, but in those less liquid climate it doesn't work quite so many wonders and transformations. In the United States we are all parvenus, all seeking to become sombody else, and money pays the passage not only from the town to the next but also from one social class to another and from one incarnation of the self to something a little more in keeping with the season's fashion. The American ideal exists as a concept in motion, as a fugitive and ill-defined hope glimmering on a horizon. No coalition, no industry, no source of wealth lasts much longer than a generation, and nobody dies in the country in which he was born. "

― Lewis H. Lapham