Quote preview background for Karan Mahajan
During these years in the small-talk wilderness, I also wondered why Americans valued friendliness with commerce so much. Was handing over cash the sacred rite of American capitalism__nd of American life? On a day that I don__ spend money in America, I feel oddly depressed. It__ my main form of social interaction__s it is for millions of Americans who live alone or away from their families.
Karan Mahajan
Turn into a Quote Card

Quote Detail

During these years in the small-talk wilderness, I also wondered why Americans valued friendliness with commerce so much. Was handing over cash the sacred rite of American capitalism__nd of American life? On a day that I don__ spend money in America, I feel oddly depressed. It__ my main form of social interaction__s it is for millions of Americans who live alone or away from their families.

Quick Answer

What this quote page tells you

This canonical quote page keeps the full saying, the attributed author, any linked work, and the topic tags together so the quote can be cited from one stable URL.

Related Quotes

More quote cards from the same area

"

What is in mind is a sort of Chautauqua...that__ the only name I can think of for it...like the traveling tent-show Chautauquas that used to move across America, this America, the one that we are now in, an old-time series of popular talks intended to edify and entertain, improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts of the hearer. The Chautauquas were pushed aside by faster-paced radio, movies and TV, and it seems to me the change was not entirely an improvement. Perhaps because of these changes the stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep. The old channels cannot contain it and in its search for new ones there seems to be growing havoc and destruction along its banks. In this Chautauqua I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated.

RP
Robert M. Pirsig

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

"

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give. The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries. We contend that for a nation to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle. The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that, when nations are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they are no longer strong.