What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can't all be worth dying for.
I'm never going to understand what Middle America wants, because I'm on a show that Middle America doesn't necessarily like but I think is really funny.
I grew up in a middle-class family in the middle of America in the middle of the last century.
On the downside, to paraphrase Thom Yorke talking about the music business, we're still having to deal with the stench of the last fart of the dying corpse of this regressive vision that America is a white, middle-aged, male, conservative country.
That was very difficult for me on 'American Idol' to feel like I had to be a certain way. It wasn't that the producers were saying that you shouldn't be gay or whatever, but there was this unspoken energy around saying you have to appeal to Middle America, and Middle America at that point was not ready for all that.
Historically, the argument is we stole the country from the Indians. America stole the labor of African Americans for over 200 years under slavery. America took half of Mexico by force in the Mexican War. American foreign policy, the progressives say it's based on theft. Why? Because look, America is very active in the Middle East. Why? The Middle East has oil. Notice that America doesn't get involved in Haiti or Rwanda because they don't have any oil.
Comcast is a big voice: they have a tremendous voice across America; they're a tremendous voice in Spanish and English, and they have a tremendous voice in Washington.
There's a very big gulf between the black civil rights leadership in America and the black middle class in America. The black middle class are conservative. Many of those minorities can be persuaded to be members of the Republican Party.
So you are dying for love, then," Will said finally, his voice sounding constricted to his own ears. 'Dying a little faster for love. And there are worse things to die for.
In the world of the Middle East at the moment, the debates are shrill. But ... the wisest voice of all of them may well be the voice of this mute thing, the Cyrus cylinder.
I travel up and down the country and I've been all around the middle of America for many years. Middle America is not one big mass of people with a proverbial beer in its hand, keeping the country down. That is not my experience of it and I don't labor under that misconception. And we have a long tradition of coming together through music in our country.
There are times when the voice of repining is completely drowned out by various louder voices: the voice of government, the voice of taste, the voice of celebrity, the voice of the real world, the voice of fear and force, the voice of gossip.
I turned a lot of people in white America - and not just white America, but middle-class America - into hip-hoppers, you know?
There are three social classes in America: upper middle class, middle class, and lower middle class.
To me, talk shows are those things during the middle of the afternoon where the underbelly of society is made to look like Middle America.
So many people are campaigning, fighting, and even dying to make a statement in the name of humanity. These people have no voice that can be heard by many. I wish more celebrities would take the initiative to be that voice.