How is the United States at once the most conservative and commercial AND the most revolutionary society on Earth?

What word or expression do you most overuse? Re-reading a collection of my stuff, I was rather startled to find that it was 'perhaps.

This huge and terrible industry [the slave trade] was blessed by all churches and for a long time aroused absolutely no religious protest. . . . In the eighteenth century, a few dissenting Mennonites and Quakers in America began to call for abolition, as did some freethinkers like Thomas Paine.

There is no English surname, however ancient and dignified, that cannot instantly be improved by the prefix ‘Spanker’.

What happens to the faith healer and the shaman when any poor citizen can see the full effect of drugs or surgeries, administered without ceremonies or mystifications? Roughly the same thing as happens to the rainmaker when the climatologist turns up, or to the diviner from the heavens when schoolteachers get hold of elementary telescopes.

The penalty for getting mugged in an American city and losing your ID is that you can't fly home.

I don't think the war in Afghanistan was ruthlessly enough waged.