Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they ...are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is impossible to think of Howard Hughes without seeing the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we d...o want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love. In a nation which increasingly appears to prize social virtues, Howard Hughes remains not merely antisocial but grandly, brilliantly, surpassingly, asocial. He is the last private man, the dream we no longer admit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake ... but absolut...e personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one's own rules.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »