It may be that the most interesting American struggle is the struggle to set oneself free from the limits one is born to, and then to learn something of the value of those limits. – Greil Marcus
Patriotism in America, as I understand it, is a matter of suffering, when the country fails to live up to its promises, or actively betrays them. – Greil Marcus
It is a sure sign that a culture has reached a dead end when it is no longer intrigued by its myths. – Greil Marcus
No failure in America, whether of love or money, is ever simple it is always a kind of betrayal, of a mass of shadowy, shared hopes. – Greil Marcus
It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch-antirevolutionaries. – Martin Luther King,Jr., The Trumpet of Conscience, 1968