That was the worst of these Americans! Always getting divorced and causing unpleasantness

She choked. His lordship, a young man with a shrinking horror of the deeper emotions, whether exhibited in woman or man, writhed silently. That was the worst of these Americans! Always getting divorced and causing unpleasantness. How was a fellow to know?

P. G. Wodehouse, The little nugget (1913), 10

The real danger today is from that fat, adolescent and delinquent millionaire, America

It does not seem to me that the English can do much harm to anybody today. After a long career of subduing savages in distant lands they discovered the most dangerous savage of all just across the English Channel and took him on and brought him to heel. But the effort proved too great and the cost too high, and although they acquitted themselves with honour they made sure that they would not be called upon to do it again. And so they anointed the hero of their dazzling feat the greatest Englishman who ever lived, dumped him at the polls and voted Clement Attlee in. Whatever fear the ghost of British imperial vocation may still hold over the world’s little people was finally removed when a renegade Englishman and his little band of thugs seized Her Majesty’s colony in Rhodesia and held it for thirteen years. No, the English have, for all practical purposes, ceased to menace the world. The real danger today is from that fat, adolescent and delinquent millionaire, America, and from all those virulent, misshapen freaks like Amin and Bokassa sired on Africa by Europe. Particularly those ones.

C. Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah (1987), 47

Two enormous countries where you can’t get servants & where everything in the shops is machine-made

Then there was talk about Russia & I said, ‘You must realize that to us in Europe, Russia & America seem exactly the same, two enormous countries where you can’t get servants & where everything in the shops is machine-made.’ She said I’d got it all wrong & her customers have gracious lives like anything.

Nancy to Jessica, 28 August 1957, ed. C. Mosley, The Mitfords: Letters between Six Sisters (2007), 319

There are only two cocktails

There are only two cocktails. The bar manuals and the women's pages of the daily press, I know, print scores of messes to which they give that honorable and glorious name. They are not cocktails, they are slops. They are fit to be drunk only in the barbarian marches and mostly are drunk there, by the barbarians. .... I have shown that our forefathers were a great people: they invented rye and bourbon. They were also a tough people: nothing so clearly proves it as they survived the fearful mixtures they also invented and then drank.

B. DeVoto, The Hour (1951), 50-51

This is the most famous line in this hard-edged gem of a book. It makes me want to engage with Martinis, and bourbon. 

Americans would eventually get to share most of the advantages of Britain’s forced opening of China’s ports without any of the violence

As for the American traders at Canton, in some ways they were the war’s greatest beneficiaries, for they would eventually get to share most of the advantages of Britain’s forced opening of China’s ports without any of the violence or the lasting stain on their national character.

S. R. Platt, Imperial Twilight (2018), 416

New drugs appeared at an astonishing rate

New drugs appeared at an astonishing rate: by 1950, more than half the medicines in common medical use had been unknown merely a decade earlier. Perhaps even more significant than these miracle drugs, shifts in public health and hygiene also drastically altered the national physiognomy of illness. Typhoid fever, a contagion whose deadly swirl could decimate entire districts in weeks, melted away as the putrid water supplies of several cities were cleansed by massive municipal efforts. Even tuberculosis, the infamous “white plague” of the nineteenth century, was vanishing, its incidence plummeting by more than half between 1910 and 1940, largely due to better sanitation and public hygiene efforts. The life expectancy of Americans rose from forty-seven to sixty-eight in half a century, a greater leap in longevity than had been achieved over several previous centuries.

S. Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies (2010), 22

Country music was the most segregated kind of music in America

So I said, Country music. The average Vietnamese cannot bear it. That southern twang, that peculiar rhythm, those strange stories — the music drives us a little crazy. Perfect, Claude said. So what song’s it going to be? After a little research, I procured a record from the jukebox of one of the Saigon bars popular with white soldiers. “Hey, Good Lookin’ ” was by the famous Hank Williams, the country music icon whose nasal voice personified the utter whiteness of the music, at least to our ears. Even someone as exposed to American culture as I shivered a little on hearing this record, somewhat scratchy from having been played so many times. Country music was the most segregated kind of music in America, where even whites played jazz and even blacks sang in the opera. Something like country music was what lynch mobs must have enjoyed while stringing up their black victims. Country music was not necessarily lynching music, but no other music could be imagined as lynching’s accompaniment. Beethoven’s Ninth was the opus for Nazis, concentration camp commanders, and possibly President Truman as he contemplated atomizing Hiroshima, classical music the refined score for the high-minded extermination of brutish hordes. Country music was set to the more humble beat of the red-blooded, bloodthirsty American heartland. It was for fear of being beaten to this beat that black soldiers avoided the Saigon bars where their white comrades kept the jukeboxes humming with Hank Williams and his kind.

Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer (2015), Kindle loc. 1,168

What the country is missing is old-fashioned followers

There are, of course, just as many leaders as there have always been. What the country is missing is old-fashioned followers. The generations that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century lost trust in every vestige of hierarchical authority, from the edicts of the Catholic bishops to the degrees of the Freemasons to the stature of federal representatives. There haven't been any new LBJs because the whole notion of leadership has changed - and the whole shape of democracy is changing

B. Bishop, The big sort (2008), 298-9

Church attendance in all industrialized societies is the best predictor of right-leaning political ideology

As with the decline in trust, however, the alignment of right-leaning political parties with churchgoing wasn't something made only in America. It happened everywhere. The most religious people in every industrialized country have come to support the party of the right. It seemed to come as a surprise to Americans after the 2000 election that those who attended church once a week were overwhelmingly Republican. But there wasn't anything unusual about that relationship. A survey of thirty-two countries in the late 1990s found that seven out of ten of those of who attended church once a week voted for the political party on the right. In fact, church attendance in all industrialized societies is the best predictor of right-leaning political ideology.

B. Bishop, The big sort (2008), 127

They become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it

The predilection of Europeans for Indian ideas went beyond the co-opting of knowledge. Most remarkably of all is that, when captured on the northern frontier of what was to become Maine, fr instance, the English preferred the Indian way if living .... Benjamin Franklin, fir one, was quite clear about this, writing in 1753:

when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho' ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail them to stay among the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.

J.H.C. King, Blood and Land: the story of native North America (2016), 183

Having a fast food restaurant within 0.1 miles of a school would result in 5.2 per cent increase in child obesity rates

The nearer you live to fast food restaurants, whether as an adult or a child, the more likely you are to have obesity. One study from 2010 looked at the weight outcomes of living near a fast food restaurant for three million children, and three million pregnant women in the US, The researchers, led by Janet Currie of Columbia University, found that having a fast food restaurant within 0.1 miles of a school would result in 5.2 per cent increase in child obesity rates.

B. Wilson, The way we eat now (2019), 223

Put all your eggs in one basket, and then watch the basket

As for the proverb 'Don't put all your eggs in one basket', that, in Carnegie's opinion, was nonsense. His advice was to 'put all your eggs in one basket, and then watch the basket.'

Carnegie, of course, was preaching what he had practiced, for those were the methods he had used to get to the top (although, to give a rounded picture, he should also have mentioned the benefits of insider trading, crony capitalism and screwing down wages).

D. Reynolds, America: Empire of Liberty (2009), 245

They really wanted freedom from error

Although the Puritans are often depicted as seeking freedom of conscience, that is misleading. They really wanted freedom from error - in other words liberty from false religion imposed by Charles and his advisers in order to foster true religion according to their Calvinist standards. Not only Catholics but also Anglicans were excluded from the colony: two of the first settlers, the Browne brothers, were shipped back home because they wanted to worship according to the Book of Common Prayer.

D. Reynolds, America: Empire of Liberty (2009), 34

It’s a problem of identity. Many of my American friends feel they don’t have enough of it.

It’s a problem of identity. Many of my American friends feel they don’t have enough of it. They often feel worthless, or they don’t know how they feel. Identity is the number-one national problem here. There seems to be a shortage of it in the land, a dearth of selfhood amidst other plenty—maybe because there are so many individual egos trying to outdo each other and enlarge themselves.

...

A culture talks most about what most bothers it: the Poles talk compulsively about the Russians and the most minute shifts of political strategy. Americans worry about who they are.

E. Hoffman, Lost in Translation (1989), 262 & 264

When most people skip the meeting, those who are left tend to be more extreme, because they care more about the outcome

If participation in political debate declines - if fewer and fewer voices engage in democratic debate - our politics will become more shrill and less balanced. When most people skip the meeting, those who are left tend to be more extreme, because they care more about the outcome... The correlation between ideological "extremism" and participation strengthened over the last quarter of the twentieth century, as people who characterize themselves as being "middle of the road" ideologically have disproportionately disappeared from public meetings, local organizations, political parties, rallies and the like. In the 1990s, self described political middle-of-the-roaders were about one-half as likely to participate in public meetings, local civic organizations, and political parties as the mid-1970s... The declines were smallest - averaging less than one-fifth - among people who described themselves as "very" liberal or "very" conservative.

D. Putnam, Bowling Alone (2000), 342

Prescient.

Faith communities in which people worship together are arguably the single most important repository of social capital in America

Faith communities in which people worship together are arguably the single most important repository of social capital in America. "The church is people," says Reverend Craig McMullen, the activist co-pastor of the Donchester Temple Baptist Church in Boston. "It's not a building; it's not an institution, even. It is relationships between one person and the next." As a rough rule of thumb, our evidence shows, nearly half of all associational memberships in America are church related, half of all personal philanthropy is religious in character, and half of all volunteering occurs in a religious context.

D. Putnam, Bowling Alone (2000), 66

I thin this really sums up the two sided nature of US religiosity. It is their dominant vehicle for cohesion, but it's do resistant to institutionalisation that it can easily just go off the rails.

Walking is akin to begging in the streets

L.A. is about space, and here one’s self-worth comes from how one chooses to navigate that space. Walking is akin to begging in the streets. Taxicabs are for foreigners and prostitutes. Bicycles, skateboards, and Rollerblades are for health nuts and kids, people with nowhere to go. And all cars, from the luxury import to the classified-ad jalopy, are status symbols, because no matter how shoddy the upholstery, how bouncy the ride, how fucked-up the paint job, the car, any car, is better than riding the bus.

P. Beatty, The Sellout (2015), 117 

Democracy came too early to America

The historian Peter Spierenburg has provocatively suggested that 'democracy came too early' to America. In Europe, first the state disarmed the people and claimed a monopoly on violence, then the people took over the apparatus of the state, in America, the people took over the state before it had forced them to lay down their arms.

S. Pinker, The better angels of our nature (2011), 118

Elsewhere, in support of this thesis (which I suspect is true) Pinker highlights the differential rates of violent crime by regions of the US, where the North East looks a lot like Europe and the West and South, less so.

The casualties at Antietam numbered for times the total suffered by American soldiers at the Normandy beaches

The casualties at Antietam numbered four times the total suffered by American soldiers at the Normandy beaches on June 6, 1944. More than twice as many Americans lost their lives in one day at Sharpsburg as fell in combat in the War of 1812, the Mexican War and the Spanish-American war combined.

J. M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (1988), 544

The United states has usually prepared for its wars after getting into them

The United states has usually prepared for its wars after getting into them. Never was this more true than the Civil War. the country was less ready for what proved to be its biggest war than for ant other war in history. In early 1861 most of the tiny 16,000-man army was scattered n seventy-nine outposts west of the Mississippi.

J. M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (1988), 312-13