In Popular Culture
As a controversial issue, compulsory acquisition has been a feature of movies and other pieces of fiction for many years.
Instances of compulsory acquisition in literature and films include The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where first Arthur Dent's home is acquired for the building of a bypass road and then the Earth is acquired (demolished) to make way for a hyperspace bypass; and The Castle, an Australian film, where the Kerrigans' home is sought to be acquired to allow for an airport extension.
In Stephen King's novel Roadwork, published in 1981, the protagonist's house is purchased to make way for a road extension.
Throughout the Tremors franchise, the retreatist Burt Gummer warns his companions about abuse of government power with specific focus on eminent domain.
Read more about this topic: Eminent Domain
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture is seductive; high culture is imperious.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“The best of us would rather be popular than right.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Cynicism makes things worse than they are in that it makes permanent the current condition, leaving us with no hope of transcending it. Idealism refuses to confront reality as it is but overlays it with sentimentality. What cynicism and idealism share in common is an acceptance of reality as it is but with a bad conscience.”
—Richard Stivers, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Culture of Cynicism: American Morality in Decline, ch. 1, Blackwell (1994)