America Quotes - page 85
![I always felt, in looking at [the Cuban] situation, that it was wrong. And I now know why. It came to me one night in Mexico. China is communist, the same as Cuba, and yet we have no problem trading with China. In fact, today we can't get over there quick enough. The difference is simple: China welcomes our corporations. Cuba threw them out. It's a basic decision of corporate America: We will punish Cuba because Castro stuck it to us by nationalizing everything after he came to power. What other reason could there be? China is far more powerful but we now welcome them into global trade with open arms-as we should-while we continue this bitter, hostile policy towards Cuba. It must be because there are still people alive in the corporate world who got hammered by Fidel's revolution. (Jesse Ventura)](https://cdn.quotesdtb.com/img/quotes_images_webp/68/jesse-ventura-basic-bitter-325968.webp)
And I think it's a prudent, responsible way, given the scale of the emergency, the scale of the damage still facing America, that we finance these additional support for the unemployed as well as the support for small business. We think there's a good case for doing it now. We want to do it in an overall fiscally responsible way.
Timothy Geithner
The aim of this book is to try to explain to top management of America that their job is to improve competitive position. One need not be an economist to understand from the papers that many American products are not competitive at home or abroad, lost to foreign invasion, causing unemployment at home. Failure of management to plan for the future and to foresee problems has nurtured waste of manpower, of materials and of machine time, all of which raise the manufacturers costs and the price the purchaser must pay. The consumer is not always willing to subsidize this waste.
W. Edwards Deming
Statistical methods had taken fire in America around 1942, following a series of ten-day intensive courses for engineers, initiated by Stanford University on a suggestion from this author. The war department also gave courses at factories of suppliers. Brilliant applications attracted much attention, but the flare of statistical methods by themselves, in an atmosphere in which management did not know their responsibilities, burned, sputtered, fizzled and died out.
W. Edwards Deming
In Europe and in America, people are now more interested in the cost of quality and in systems of quality-audit. But in Japan, we are keeping very strong interest to improve quality by use of methods which you started.... when we improve quality we also improve productivity, just as you told us in 1950 would happen.
W. Edwards Deming
Respect for intellectual excellence, the restoration of vigor and discipline to our ideas of study, curricula which aim at strengthening intellectual fiber and stretching the power of young minds, personal commitment and responsibility - these are the preconditions of educational recovery in America today; and, I believe, they have always been the preconditions of happiness and sanity for the human race.
Adlai Stevenson II
We talk a great deal about patriotism. What do we mean by patriotism in the context of our times? I venture to suggest that what we mean is a sense of national responsibility which will enable America to remain master of her power - to walk with it in serenity and wisdom, with self-respect and the respect of all mankind; a patriotism that puts country ahead of self; a patriotism which is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime. The dedication of a lifetime - these are words that are easy to utter, but this is a mighty assignment. For it is often easier to fight for principles than to live up to them.
Adlai Stevenson II
There is a new America every morning when we wake up. It is upon us whether we will it or not. The new America is the sum of many small changes - a new subdivision here, a new school there, a new industry where there had been swampland - changes that add up to a broad transformation of our lives. Our task is to guide these changes. For, though change is inevitable, change for the better is a full-time job.
Adlai Stevenson II
Our nation stands at a fork in the political road. In one direction lies a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving; the land of smash and grab and anything to win. This is Nixonland. But I say to you that it is not America.
Adlai Stevenson II
Happily for us, students have not tried to overthrow the Government of the United States, but they certainly are making their views felt in public affairs. I think especially of the participation of American students in the great struggle to advance civil and human rights in America. Indeed, even a jail sentence is no longer a dishonor but a proud achievement.
Adlai Stevenson II
Even in Scandinavia, where social democratic institutions were far more culturally ingrained, membership of the EU-or even just participation in the World Trade Organization and other international agencies-appeared to constrain locally-initiated legislation. In short, social democracy seemed doomed by that same internationalization which its early theorists had so enthusiastically adumbrated as the future of capitalism.
From this perspective, social democracy-like liberalism-was a byproduct of the rise of the European nation-state: a political idea keyed to the social challenges of industrialization in developed societies. Not only was there no ‘socialism' in America, but social democracy as a working compromise between radical goals and liberal traditions lacked widespread support in any other continent. There was no shortage of enthusiasm for revolutionary socialism in much of the non-Western world, but the distinctively European compromise did not export well.
Tony Judt
What's missing from public conversation and public policy conversation is precisely a sort of moral underpinning, a sense of the moral purposes that bind people together in functional societies. And part of the attraction of someone who otherwise didn't appeal to me in the least-like, say, Pope John Paul II-was how he managed to connect with young people. Whether it was in Eastern Europe or Latin America or wherever, his was the sense of an absolutely, unambiguously, morally noncompromising view about what is right and what is wrong. It seems to me that we need to reintroduce some of that. We need to reintroduce confidently and unashamedly that kind of language into the public realm. And not expel it, so to speak, into church for Sunday. It's not only on Sunday that some things are right and some things are wrong.
Tony Judt
America - a conservative country without any conservative ideology - appears now before the world a naked and arbitrary power, as, in the name of realism, its men of decision enforce their often crackpot definitions upon world reality. The second-rate mind is in command of the ponderously spoken platitude. In the liberal rhetoric, vagueness, and in the conservative mood, irrationality, are raised to principle. Public relations and the official secret, the trivializing campaign and the terrible fact clumsily accomplished, are replacing the reasoned debate of political ideas in the privately incorporated economy, the military ascendancy, and the political vacuum of modern America.
C. Wright Mills
Many of today's trading relationships actually make America more globally competitive. . . . Raising tariffs among the United States, Canada and Mexico will only weaken a well-oiled manufacturing machine that is driven by the high level of integration the three economies have in their supply chains. This integration makes the region as a whole more competitive vis-à-vis the world.
George Shultz
The point of Obama's candidacy is that the damaged state of American democracy is not the fault of George W. Bush and his minions, the corporate-controlled media, the insurance industry, the oil industry, lobbyists, terrorists, illegal immigrants or Satan. The point is that this mess is our fault. We let in the serpents and liars, we exchanged shining ideals for a handful of nails and some two-by-fours, and we did it by resorting to the simplest, deepest-seated and readiest method we possess as human beings for trying to make sense of the world: through our fear. America has become a phobocracy.
Michael Chabon
