Val Kilmer Quotes

Whenever people in that part of the world asked Patterson about the wonders of America, the possibilities and the hope of America, Patterson would say that it was a good and fine place but all the Americans were running it into the ground and that it would be a far better place if it had no Americans.

It's one thing to break stuff and damage people's possessions, but when you start aiming at the ideology of America, that's dangerous comedy.

I've always tried to write about America. It's very worth a writer's effort.

The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.

My favorite bad thing about 'Three Billboards' is its ambition to play around with America's ideological and geographical toys.

America is the big subject of the second half of the 20th century, tackled in one form or another by all the great American male writers. You could make a case for saying that it was the only game in town - from Bellow to Roth to Updike to Richard Ford - America was more or less explicitly the leitmotif.

There's a lot of hip-hop that's oriented toward a progressive view of America because it's oriented toward a civil rights progress and a critique of the power structure.

There are objective people, there are opinion people, and in my opinion that makes for a better America.

If you play Mark Twain and he's not funny, you are definitely not playing Mark Twain. That was the biggest challenge, in some ways. Writing and performing jokes that can come out of that brilliant delivery system he constructed: the friendly, avuncular truth-teller.

I know people who are embarrassed to be American. They don't like showing their passports. It's becoming a scary place. It takes someone very brave not to be quiet, someone who doesn't mind death threats, their life being turned upside down, news cameras outside their door. There is no freedom of speech in America anymore. They are not living up to the constitution. There's so much fear in America and control.

I'm a controversial artist, one who dares to have an opinion and bothers to create music and videos that challenge people's ideas in a world that is watered-down and hollow. In my work I examine the America we live in, and I've always tried to show people that the devil we blame our atrocities on is really just each one of us. So don't expect the end of the world to come one day out of the blue – it's been happening every day for a long time.

This is America. We must defend the principles symbolized by Lady Liberty - unless she's on the pill, in which case, she is a giant green tramp.

Americans must be the most sententious people in history. Far too busy to be religious, they have always felt that they sorely needed guidance.

The Negro loves America enough to criticize her fundamentally. Most white Americans simply can't be bothered.

On the other side of the spectrum, you see someone like Donald Trump, who is using as the basis of his campaign political incorrectness. It's clearly intentional. He'd have to be a complete moron just to coincidentally insult Mexicans, and women, and disabled people, and Muslims. So clearly he's using it as a vote winner. But I think with comedians there's a responsibility.

When politicians and politically minded people pay too much attention to literature, it is a bad sign - a bad sign mostly for literature. But it is also a bad sign when they don't want to hear the word mentioned.

I'm an American. We're a people diseased with progress.

I think that critiquing the myths of our society and helping people find their way through them is a very important thing. It's a theme that goes through all of my work.

There was one woman who had a giant sign and on it, it just said, 'America Is Better Than Abortion.' I think she meant that America was too good a place for the horror of abortion. But instead, it sounded like she had weighed both - the American spirit and getting an abortion and decided that American spirit better. I think it is a bad idea to have grammatically ambiguous protest signs.

The fact that there are so many weak, poor and boring stories and novels written and published in America has been ascribed by our rebels to the horrible squareness of our institutions, the idiocy of power, the debasement of sexual instincts, and the failure of writers to be alienated enough. The poems and novels of these same rebellious spirits, and their theoretical statements, are grimy and gritty and very boring too, besides being nonsensical, and it is evident by now that polymorphous sexuality and vehement declarations of alienation are not going to produce great works of art either.

There are very significant ways around America on how to break its grip, which is, of course, a way to exclude dissenting voices before tens of millions of people.

The artist is still a little like the old court jester. He's supposed to speak his vicious paradoxes with some sense in them, but he isn't part of whatever the fabric is that makes a nation.

You see, we're America the Beautiful, not America 'Well, At Least She Has a Great Personality'.

The people know more about [Jazz] in other countries than in America. America is the last country to know about anything, because we're too fat, we have too much of everything, you understand? And we do not listen.

America's strength is that it is capable of accepting people into its communities.