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Wildland: The Making of America's Fury QUOTES

Wildland: The Making of America's Fury QUOTES

1 " Over the centuries, Americans have tacked between sanctifying the individual and celebrating community, between self-interest and social obligation, between the imagined ideals of the lone cowboy on the frontier and of the wagon train that relies on mutual aid. Alexis de Tocqueville took note of that tension and saw their coexistence as an American talent, which he called “self-interest rightly understood. "

― Evan Osnos , Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

2 " On a per-capita basis, Americans from small towns were more than twice as likely to die at war in the years after September 11 than Americans in big cities were. "

― Evan Osnos , Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

3 " Winston Churchill, who said, “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us. "

― Evan Osnos , Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

4 " In 1965, the CEO of an average large public company earned about 20 times as much as a frontline worker. By 2019, that figure was 278 times as much. "

― Evan Osnos , Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

5 " In 2013, the average white family in Washington was eighty-one times richer than the average Black family. "

― Evan Osnos , Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

6 " We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both. "

― Evan Osnos , Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

7 " Americans had been attacked more than twice as many times by far-right terrorists as they had by Islamic terrorists, yet when researchers in 2016 asked people to estimate the share of Muslims in the country, Americans, on average, estimated one in six. The real number was one in a hundred. "

― Evan Osnos , Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

8 " the United States entered the twenty-first century with more prisoners than farmers. "

― Evan Osnos , Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

9 " writing honestly about a place—any place—means writing about power, who has it and who does not, and what some people will do to get it or deprive others of it. "

― Evan Osnos , Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

10 " In 2012, super PACs spent a billion dollars; 73 percent of the money came from just a hundred people. "

― Evan Osnos , Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

11 " Research showed that, as early as preschool, an atmosphere of danger imposed a level of background stress that hampered verbal development by the equivalent of a full year of schooling. "

― Evan Osnos , Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

12 " To critics, wealthy philanthropists were subverting the democratic process. In bypassing the public sector, in the belief that it was incompetent or inefficient, they were hastening a decline of trust and investment in government, and foreclosing society’s collective discussion of how to govern itself. "

― Evan Osnos , Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

13 " John Boehner, Speaker of the House, said that lawmakers should not be judged by “how many new laws we create” but, rather, by “how many laws we repeal. "

― Evan Osnos , Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

14 " The country was entering one of the most rapid diversifications in history. In the 1970s, about 5 percent of the people in America had been born abroad; by 2018, that figure was 14 percent, nearly surpassing the record set in 1890, when 15 percent of the population had been born abroad. "

― Evan Osnos , Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

15 " As I traveled between Clarksburg and Chicago in that year of election, I was sometimes struck that, for all their differences, Black Chicagoans and white Appalachians had come to share a sensation that was calcifying in America’s political culture—a feeling of being trapped by an undertow of economics and history, of being ill-served by institutions, of being estranged from a political machinery that was refined, above all, to serve itself. "

― Evan Osnos , Wildland: The Making of America's Fury

16 " How did they explain the triumphs and the catastrophes in their lives? Who was responsible, and what were the costs of that responsibility? Who told them the truth, and who lied? What did they expect from their government—and what did they get? How safe did they feel—in their bodies, their homes, their neighborhoods? What, ultimately, did we owe one another as citizens of a political commons? "

― Evan Osnos , Wildland: The Making of America's Fury