Steve Erickson Quotes

I don't think the entire universe outside of Trump and his supporters has any way of understanding how many Trump supporters thought, and maybe still do think a little, that we're on the verge of losing the United States of America forever. And that is a big deal.

In a war of ideas it is people who get killed.

All of my work has been about ideas of utopia and dystopia. I think that's what gives America interest. It's many things all at once. It's such a complicated society.

Have you heard a single national figure tell you all of the crises of the recent past are not economic, they're cultural?

Emotional stability has not been America's gift to the world.

Western man is schizophrenic.

The biggest gap there is in America is not economic; the gap is spiritual and cultural.

My heart aches for America and its deceived people.

Terrorists hate the ideas America has championed around the world. It is inevitable that people will wonder if there are intellectual connections with others who have turned to violence to attack international finance, globalization and the United States

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

Since coming back from overseas, this is more of a foreign country than the places overseas. I don't understand it. It's like America has lost faith in rational thought.

Subjecting prisoners to abuse leads to bad intelligence, because under torture a detainee will tell his interrogator anything to make the pain stop. Second, mistreatment of our prisoners endangers U.S. troops who might be captured by the enemy – if not in this war, then in the next. And third, prisoner abuses exact on us a terrible toll in the war of ideas, because inevitably these abuses become public.

The idea of America is so wonderful because the more equal something is, the more American it is

In the United States at present the 'culture wars' of the last thirty years have now produced a horrid stand-off which compels you all into a binary either/or with all kinds of spin-offs. This is deeply unhealthy. The trouble is that the way the system is set up in order to get in and try to change it you have to be (a) a millionaire, (b) someone who can work inside the system long-term, (c) someone prepared to make deals and compromises... Which does rule out the vast majority of committed Christians.

We're fighting people that hates our values, they can't stand what America stands for.

We need to make clear that the economic crisis has to be matched by a crisis of ideas. That's the problem, right? The economic crisis is not matched by a crisis of ideas. That's where the war is going to be fought.

There is a residual sense for me, having grown up in the early '70s, that I did not know I had, which was a sense that the military are different than I. Because there was such a divide between the military world - and there still is, because there's no draft - and the civilian world is one of the rotten harvests of the Vietnam War, was this sort of bifurcation of America in that way.

I salute to you Commander and I sneeze 'Cause I have Now an Allergy To your policies it seems Where have we gone wrong America? Mr. Lincoln we can't seem to find you anywhere out of the millions From the deserts To the mountains Over prairies To the shores Is this just the Madness of King George Yo George Is this just the Madness of King George Yo George Well you have the whole Nation on all fours.

There is a war being waged right now on prayer and religion by liberals who are taking every opportunity to make America as God-less as possible.

I think we're really hungry for family in America, especially when I feel like people are really pulled apart from their families. So, we were interested in the idea of what the extreme version of that would be.

We [Democrats] have become a party of assembling all these different groups, the women's caucus and the black caucus and the Hispanic caucus and the lesbian-gay-transgender caucus and so forth, and that doesn't relate to people out in rural America.

But we have a war of ideals and ideas, and that is to sell democracy.

There is no other genre that deals with America better, in a subtextual way, than the Westerns being made in the different decades. The '50s Westerns very much put forth an Eisenhower idea of America, whereas the Westerns of the '70s were very cynical about America.

My parents, who were Communists, always pretended to be American patriots. You can always convince yourself you are: 'I love America, I just want it to be perfect, which it will be when it becomes a Soviet Communist state'. When the left called for 'liberation' what it really wanted was to erase the human slate and begin again. Like everybody else, I see things that need to be improved. I just am mindful of the fact that they can be made a lot worse.

There are two Americas. One is the America of Lincoln and Adlai Stevenson; the other is the America of Teddy Roosevelt and the modern superpatriots. One is generous and humane, the other narrowly egotistical; one is self-critical, the other self-righteous; one is sensible, the other romantic; one is good-humored, the other solemn; one is inquiring, the other pontificating; one is moderate, the other filled with passionate intensity; one is judicious and the other arrogant in the use of great power.