“The people of the United States, perhaps more than any other nation in history, love to abase themselves and proclaim their unworthiness, and seem to find refreshment in doing so... That is a dark frivolity, but still frivolity. ”

“The obvious effect of frivolous divorce will be frivolous marriage. If people can be separated for no reason they will feel it all the easier to be united for no reason.”

“They DO live more in earnest, more in themselves, and less in surface, change, and frivolous external things. I could fancy a love for life here almost possible; and I was a fixed unbeliever in any love of a year's standing.”

“Life...was nothing more than a system of atavistic contracts, banal ceremonies, preordained words, with which people entertained each other...The dominant sign in that paradise of provincial frivolity was the fear of the unknown”

“Rome, on the other hand, lost—suffering on that one day more battle deaths than the United States during the entire course of the war in Vietnam, suffering more dead soldiers than any other army on any single day of combat in the entire course of Western military history.”

“Throughout the nation's history, the national destiny of the United States has been understood in antimilitaristic, libertarian terms.”