Florence King Quotes on America (9 Quotes)

People are so busy dreaming the American Dream, fantasizing about what they could be or have a right to be, that they're all asleep at the switch. Consequently we are living in the Age of Human Error.

Any discussion of the problems of being funny in America will not make sense unless we substitute the word wit for humor. Humor inspires sympathetic good-natured laughter and is favored by the ''healing-power'' gang. Wit goes for the jugular, not the jocu

American couples have gone to such lengths to avoid the interference of in-laws that they have to pay marriage counselors to interfere between them.

America is not a democracy, it's an absolute monarchy ruled by King Kid. In a nation of immigrants, the child is automatically more of an American than his parents. Americans regard children as what Mr. Hudson in ''Upstairs, Downstairs'' called ''betters.'' Aping their betters, American adults do their best to turn themselves into children. Puerility exercises droit de seigneur everywhere.

We want a president who is as much like an American tourist as possible. Someone with the same goofy grin, the same innocent intentions, the same naive trust a president with no conception of foreign policy and no discernible connection to government.

The witty woman is a tragic figure in American life. Wit destroys eroticism and eroticism destroys wit, so women must choose between taking lovers and taking no prisoners.

Any hope that America would finally grow up vanished with the rise of fundamentalist Christianity. Fundamentalism, with its born-again regression, its pink-and-gold concept of heaven, its literal-mindedness, its rambunctious good cheer... its anti-intellectualism... its puerile hymns... and its faith-healing... are made to order for King Kid America.

The vitamin has been reified. A chemical intangible originally defined as a unit of nutritive value, it was long ago reified into a pill. Now it is a pill no one except a few precise scientists define it as anything else. Once the vitamin became a pill, it became ''real'' according to the precepts of American Cartesianism ''I swallow it, therefore it is.''

Time has lost all meaning in that nightmare alley of the Western world known as the American mind.