“That natural disasters are required to provide Americans with a glimpse of reality in their own country is an indication of the deep rot infecting the official political culture.”

“American political culture quickly and always outpaces any attempt to satirize it.”

“Preservation of one's own culture does not require contempt or disrespect for other cultures.”

“... the connection between imperial politics and culture is astonishingly direct. American attitudes to American "greatness", to hierarchies of race, to the perils of "other" revolutions (the American revolution being considered unique and somehow unrepeatable anywhere else in the world) have remained constant, have dictated, have obscured, the realities of empire, while apologists for overseas American interests have insisted on American innocence, doing good, fighting for freedom.”

“As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender isalso the discursive/cultural means by which “sexed nature” or “a naturalsex” is produced and established as “prediscursive,” prior to culture,a politically neutral surface on which culture acts”

“The highest patriotism is not a blind acceptance of official policy, but a love of one's country deep enough to call her to a higher standard.”