" Your country baffles me: a luxurious unharmed lotus land in which great hordes of handsome dynamic people either wallow in deep gloom, or play like overexcited children, or fall to work like all the devils in hell, while the press steadily drones detestation of the government and despair of the system. I don’t understand how America works, any more than Frances Trollope or Dickens did, but it’s an ongoing miracle of sorts. "

― Herman Wouk , War and Remembrance (The Henry Family, #2)