quote of the day

"I believe that, for the rest of the world contemporary America is an almost symbolic concentration of all the good and the bad of our civilization--ranging from the fantastic development of science and technology generating more welfare and the profundity of civil liberty and strength of democratic institutions, to the blind cult of perpetual economic growth and never-ending consumption, no matter how detrimental to the environment, the dictates of materialism, consumerism and advertising, the voiding of human uniqueness and its replacement by the uniformity of the round-the-clock noise of TV banality. Who thinks today about future generations? Who is concerned about what people will eat, drink, breathe in one hundred years, where they will get energy when there are twice as many people living on this planet as today? Only an idealist, a dreamer, a genuinely spiritual person who, they say, is not modern enough. These dreamers, who are often at the margin of society, will find their way to the place they belong, among the politicians, only if the very spirit of politics changes towards deeper responsibility for the world." --V·clav Havel, 1997