Failed American Dream Quotes & Sayings

Water is taught by thirst;
Land, by the oceans passed;
Transport, by throe;
Peace, by its battles told;
Love, by memorial mould;
Birds, by the snow. — Emily Dickinson

And it's a lie that has consequences, because the great American dream is to have a good job, and in recent years, America has failed to deliver that dream more than it has at any time in recent memory. A good job is an individual's primary identity, their very self-worth, their dignity - it establishes the relationship they have with their friends, community and country. When we fail to deliver a good job that fits a citizen's talents, training and experience, we are failing the great American dream. — Jim Clifton

Love is you, you and me. Love is knowing we can be. — John Lennon

[I]t is certain that no subjects or citizens, when legally armed and kept in due order by their masters, ever did the least mischief to any state. . . . Rome remained free for four hundred years and Sparta eight hundred, although their citizens were armed all that time; but many other states that have been disarmed have lost their liberties in less than forty years.6 — Les Adams

It's because of my grandfather that I became a Young Avenger. But it's hard sometimes, to be a black kid carrying a name like "Patriot". I remember talking to Captain America about before he died, and he explained what Patriotism meant to him...
It wasn't about blindly supporting your government. It was about knowing what your country could be, what it should be... And trying to lead it there through your example. And holding it accountable when it failed. I remember he said: "There's noting patriotic about corruption or cover-ups... or defending them. But exposing them, well, that takes a hero. — Ed Brubaker

Pride is a wound, and vanity is the scab on it. One's life picks at the scab to open the wound again and again. In men, it seldom heals and often grows septic. — Michael Ayrton

Finishing games has been something I'm really proud of, seeing something through to the end. — Felicia Day

We felt trapped in two seemingly unwinnable wars, in which a disproportionate share of the fighters came from our neighborhood, and in an economy that failed to deliver the most basic promise of the American Dream - a steady wage. — J.D. Vance

What our generation failed to learn was the nobility of work. An honest day's labor. The worthiness of the man in the white socks who would pull out a picture of his grandkids from his wallet. For us, the factory would never do. And turning away from our birthright - our grandfather in the white socks - is the thing that ruined us. — Charlie LeDuff

Pigpen saunters up beside me. He's in his midtwenties and a wall of solid muscle. Most men wet themselves when he looks in their direction. "Eli wants him in. — Katie McGarry

I once again felt an odd flush of admiration for my partner's faith in a religion I had long ago abandoned. She doesn't advertise it or announce it at every turn, and she has nothing but scorn for the patriarchal hierarchy that runs the church, but she nevertheless holds firm to a belief in the religion and ritual with a quiet intensity that can't be shaken. — Dennis Lehane

America's drug war is so stupid that if you pay close attention to just how stupid it is
it'll drive you to use drugs. — Jim Hightower

Hey, what've you got?" "Same fukking thing as you," Juan grunted. "Hot bag of balanced nutrients in a tasty fukking paste. — Tanya Huff

But in a society with no central motivation, so far adrift and puzzled with itself that its President feels called upon to appoint a Committee on National Goals, a sense of alienation is likely to be very popular
especially among people young enough to shrug off the guilt they're suppose to feel for deviating from a goal or purpose they never understood in the first place. Let the old people wallow in the shame of having failed. The laws they made to preserve a myth are no longer pertinent; the so called American Way begins to seem like a dike made of cheap cement, with many more leaks than the law has fingers to plug. America has been breeding mass anomie since the end of World War II. It is not a political thing, but the sense of new realities, or urgency, anger and sometimes desperation in a society where even the highest authorities seem to be grasping at straws. — Hunter S. Thompson

Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun. — Kurt Vonnegut

She smelled of lemon and sunshine and a thousand Summer days filled with laughter. — Elizabeth Camden

If you can hit a guy once, you can hit him twice. — Charles Bukowski