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Quote by Alex Kudera

“I'd attended a selective liberal arts college, trained at respectable research institutions, and even completed a dissertation for a doctoral degree. In our shared office, I'd tell new hires I was ABD, so they wouldn't feel their own situation was so bleak. If they saw a ten-year veteran adjunct with a PhD, they might lose hope of securing a permanent job. It was the least I could do, as a good American, to remind the young we were an innocent and optimistic country where everyone was entitled to a fulfilling career. To make sure they understood that PhD stood not for "piled higher and deeper" or "Pop has dough," but in fact the degree meant "professional happiness desired," and at the altruistic colleges of democratic America only the angry or sad ones need not apply.”

Quote by Alex Kudera

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Auggie's Revenge

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Alex Kudera

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“The great American dream that reached out to the stars has been lost to the stripes. We have forgotten where we came from, we don’t know where we are, and we fear where we may be going. Afraid, we turn from the glorious adventure of the pursuit of happiness to a pursuit of an illusionary security in an ordered, stratified, striped society. Our way of life is symbolized to the world by the stripes of military force. At home we have made a mockery of being our brother’s keeper by being his jail keeper. When Americans can no longer see the stars, the times are tragic. We must believe that it is the darkness before the dawn of a beautiful new world; we will see it when we believe it.”

“My town, populated almost entirely by the descendants of white Christian Europeans, had few connections to the outside world, perhaps by choice, and so their resentments and fears festered with little reason to ever be expressed to anyone but one another. I don’t remember much talk of foreign affairs, or of other countries, rarely even of New York, which loomed like a terrifying shadow above us, the place Americans went either to be mugged or to think they were better than everyone else. That was my sense of the outside world: where Americans went to be hurt or to hurt others. When I got into an elite college, I took this small-town defensiveness with me, but slowly discovered that the world was actually kaleidoscopic, full of possibilities.”

“I was once driven north along Central Park, all the way from Chinatown. We hailed the cab in front of a building where Orthodox Jews still lived, so they shut down an elevator on Saturdays. In the taxi, I was with my mother. We were visiting her aunt, my great aunt, who was 93. She had no memory of the old country, Lithuania, but she'd been born there. Her parents escaped the pogroms so she could survived a century here. Her American prosperity was half a century of subsistence wages and thirty years of Medicare in an elevator building. The old country for the cab driver was Bangladesh, and he was a talker. He'd just graduated from college, and his prospects were good. He'd majored in a practical field, network engineering or something like that. Young and optimistic, he spoke fluent English. His big idea was to keep his countrymen out of the United States. America was great, but if he got overrun with foreigners, his kind in particular, it would be ruined. "Bangladesh is hot and crowded. Why would want to make America like that." He said this in all sincerity.”

“What is key to America's understanding of class is the persistent belief - despite all evidence to the contrary - that anyone, with the proper discipline and drive, can move from a lower class to a higher class. We recognize the mobility may be difficult, but the key to our collective self-image is the assumption that mobility is always possible, so failure to move up reflects on one's character.”