“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste.”
David Foster Wallace on Americans
“There is something inescapably bovine about an American tourist in motion as part of a group.” —David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
“Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image, but thee who destroys a good book, kills reason its self.”
Ralph Ellison on Living
“That is the real soul-sickness, the spear in the side, the drag by the neck through the mob-angry town, the Grand Inquisition, the embrace of the Maiden, the rip in the belly with the guts spilling out, the trip to the chamber with the deadly gas that ends in the oven so hygienically clean – only it’s worse because you continue stupidly to live.”–Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
“Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity?
—Silent Spring (1962)