Larry King Live interview (2010)
Context: I don't hate America. I love America. I want it to be better. The only way we can get it to be better is to realistically criticize what's wrong with it. That's not what the Republicans do. … I don't want to be a pessimist. I'm a realist. One man's realist is another man's pessimist. But, no, I'm not like Mitt Romney, whose book is called No Apology, the Case for American Greatness. Really? Always waving the big foam number one finger; we're not number one in most things. We're number one in military. We're number one in money. We're number one in fat toddlers, meth labs, and people we send to prison. We're not number one in literacy, money spent on education. We're not even number one in social mobility. Social mobility means basically the American dream, the ability of one generation to do better than the next. We're tenth. That's like Sweden coming tenth in Swedish meatballs.
“Our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time; what we really want is for things to reamin the same but get better…”
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Sydney J. Harris 44
American journalist 1917–1986Related quotes
As quoted in Unleashing Intellectual Capital (2000) by Charles Ehin, p. 99
“People want to change everything and, at the same time, want it all to remain the same.”
Source: The Devil and Miss Prym
"The Path of the Law," Address to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts at the dedication of the new hall of the Boston University School of Law (8 January 1897), published in Harvard Law Review, Vol. 10 (25 March 1897).
1890s
Connections (1979), 1 - The Trigger Effect
Context: The Egyptians built an empire and ran it with a handful of technology... the wheel, irrigation canals, the loom, the calendar, pen & ink, some cutting tools, some simple metallurgy, and the plough, the invention that triggered it all off. And yet look how complex and sophisticated their civilisation was. And how soon it happened, after that first man-made harvest. The Egyptian plough and those of the few other civilisations sprang up around the world at the same time... Gave us control over nature... And at the same time, tied us for good, to the things that we invent so that tomorrow will be better than today. The Egyptians knew that. That's why they had gods. To make sure that their systems didn't fail.
Avons-nous pour cela méprisé ce qu'il estime, et estimé ce qu'il méprise? Avons nous fui ce qu'il recherche , et recherché ce qu'il fuit? Avons-nous aimé ce qu'il hait, et haï ce qu'il aime?
Examens particuliers sur divers sujets, p. 321 http://books.google.com/books?id=esY9AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA321
Examens particuliers sur divers sujets [Examination of Conscience upon Special Subjects] (1690)