Our decision about energy will test the character of the American people and the ability of the President and the Congress to gove...rn this nation. This difficult effort will be the "moral equivalent of war," except that we will be uniting our efforts to build and not to destroy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The American ideal ... of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This idea has created cowboys and I...ndians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white. It is an ideal so paralytically infantile that it is virtually forbidden--as an unpatriotic act--that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The American novel tends to rest in contradictions and among extreme ranges of experience. When it attempts to resolve contradicti...ons, it does so in oblique, morally equivocal ways. As a general rule, it does so either in melodramatic actions or in pastoral idylls, although intermixed with both one may find the stirring instabilities of "American humor." These qualities constitute the uniqueness of that branch of the novelistic tradi tion which has flourished in this country. They help to account for the strong element of "romance" in the American "novel." By contrast, the English novel has followed a middle way. It is notable for its great practical sanity, its powerful, engrossing composition of wide ranges of experience into a moral centrality and equability of judgment. Oddity, distortion of personality, dislocations of normal life, recklessness of behavior--these the English novel has included. Yet the profound poetry of disorder we find in the American novel is missing, with rare exceptions, from the English.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, i...nvesting and prospering in the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The American doctrinaire is the converse of the American demagogue, and, in this way, is scarcely less injurious to the public. Th...e first deals in poetry, the last in cant. He is as much a visionary on one side, as the extreme theoretical democrat is a visionary on the other.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We look at the dance to impart the sensation of living in an affirmation of life, to energize the spectator into keener awareness ...of the vigor, the mystery, the humor, the variety, and the wonder of life. This is the function of the American dance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Movies are one of the bad habits that corrupted our century. Of their many sins, I offer as the worst their effect on the intellec...tual side of the nation. It is chiefly from that viewpoint I write of them--as an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming a cultured people.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am firmly opposed to the government entering into any business the major purpose of which is competition with our citizens ... f...or the Federal Government deliberately to go out to build up and expand ... a power and manufacturing business is to break down the initiative and enterprise of the American people; it is the destruction of equality of opportunity amongst our people, it is the negation of the ideals upon which our civilization has been based.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But now Nixon has come along and everything I've worked for is ruined. There's a story in the paper every day about him slashing a...nother one of my Great Society programs. I can just see him waking up in the morning, making that victory sign of his and deciding which program to kill. It's a terrible thing for me to sit by and watch someone else starve my Great Society to death. She's getting thinner and thinner and uglier and uglier all the time; now her bones are beginning to stick out and her wrinkles are beginning to show. Soon she'll be so ugly that the American people will refuse to look at her; they'll stick her in a closet to hide her away and there she'll die. And when she dies, I, too, will die.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »