Autobiographers From The United States

"Since my seventeenth year, I have tried to live according to the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg. By "church" he did not mean an ecclesiastical organization, but a spiritual fellowship of thoughtful men and women who spend their lives for a service to mankind that outlasts them. He called it a civilization that was to be born of a healthy, universal religion—goodwill, mutual understanding, service from each to all, regardless of dogma or ritual."

"Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold."

"No doubt the reason is that character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved."

"Many persons have a wrong of idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose."

"Believe, when you are most unhappy, that there is something for you to do in the world. So long as you can sweeten another's pain, life is not in vain."

"When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us."

"Self-culture has been loudly and boastfully proclaimed as sufficient for all our ideals of perfection. But if we listen to the best men and women everywhere ... they will say that science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all — the apathy of human beings."

"It is the possibility of happiness, intelligence and power that give life its sanctity, and they are absent in the case of a poor, misshapen, paralyzed, unthinking creature."

"Our puny sentimentalism has caused us to forget that a human life is sacred only when it may be of some use to itself and to the world."

"The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision."

"Some years ago I met a gentleman who was introduced to me as Mr. McKelway, editor of the Brooklyn Eagle ... At the time the compliments that he paid me were so generous that I blush to remember them. But now that I have come out for Socialism he reminds me and the public that I am deaf and blind and especially liable to error.... The Eagle and I are at war. When it fights back, let it fight fair.... It is not fair fighting or good argument to remind me and others that I cannot see or hear."

"Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.... You ask for votes for women. What good can votes do when ten-elevenths of the land of Great Britain belongs to 200,000 and only one-eleventh to the rest of the 40,000,000? Have your men with their millions of votes freed themselves from this injustice?"

"The problems of deafness are deeper and more complex, if not more important, than those of blindness. Deafness is a much worse misfortune. For it means the loss of the most vital stimulus — the sound of the voice that brings language, sets thoughts astir and keeps us in the intellectual company of man."

"We differ, blind and seeing, one from another, not in our senses, but in the use we make of them, in the imagination and courage with which we seek wisdom beyond the senses."

"The bulk of the world's knowledge is an imaginary construction."

"The only real blind person at Christmas-time is he who has not Christmas in his heart. We sightless children had the best of eyes that day in our hearts and in our finger-tips. We were glad from the child's necessity of being happy. The blind who have outgrown the child's perpetual joy can be children again on Christmas Day and celebrate in the midst of them who pipe and dance and sing a new song!"

"I want to say to those who are trying to learn to speak and those who are teaching them: Be of good cheer. Do not think of to-day's failures, but of the success that may come to-morrow. You have set yourselves a difficult task, but you will succeed if you persevere, and you will find a joy in overcoming obstacles — a delight in climbing rugged paths, which you would perhaps never know if you did not sometime slip backward — if the road was always smooth and pleasant. Remember, no effort that we make to attain something beautiful is ever lost. Sometime, somewhere, somehow we shall find that which we seek. We shall speak, yes, and sing, too, as God intended we should speak and sing."

"One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar."

"If the light were not in your eyes, dear Mr. Brooks, you would understand better how happy your little Helen was when her teacher explained to her that the best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen nor even touched but just felt in the heart."

"If Reagan becomes President, it will be my father's fault. If J.L. had only given Reagan better pictures, he'd have never left the movies and gone into politics."

"The 1980s were a curious time — a time of realization that a new age was upon us. Now, from the perspective of our time, it is obvious that like the pieces of a global chain of events, Ronald Reagan, John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher and even Mikhail Gorbachev helped bring about this new age in Europe. We at Solidarity like to claim more than a little credit, too, for bringing about the end of the Cold War. In the Europe of the 1980s, Ronald Reagan presented the vision. For us in Central and Eastern Europe, that meant freedom from the Soviets. As I say repeatedly, we owe so much to all those who supported us. Perhaps in the early years, we didn’t express enough gratitude. We were so busy introducing all the necessary economic and political reforms in our reborn country. Yet President Ronald Reagan must have realized what remarkable changes he brought to Poland, and indeed the rest of the world. And I hope he felt gratified. He should have."

"When talking about Ronald Reagan, I have to be personal. We in Poland took him so personally. Why? Because we owe him our liberty. This can’t be said often enough by people who lived under oppression for half a century, until communism fell in 1989."

"I understand and embrace the wisdom of Ronald Reagan's big tent within the party, big, big tent, remember? Ronald Reagan, great man, great guy. Remember he included Reagan Democrats and Independents and Republicans, a lot of people. We're going to have the same thing. There a lot of Democrats perhaps in this room, are there a lot of Democrats? Raise your hands. I mean, I don't think we need too many to be honest with you, but -- so I embraced the wisdom that my 80 percent friend is not my 20 percent enemy, Ronald Reagan. Stated by Ronald Reagan, pretty good."

"The epitaph of the Reagan presidency will be: "When Ronald Reagan became President, the United States was the largest creditor nation. When he left the presidency, we were the world's largest debtor nation.""

"The concept of Ronald Reagan as a master Mole for the Aryan Nation has not taken hold yet, in the centers of political power. Even his closest people still see him as a profoundly talented old man from Hollywood who will go down in history as perhaps the greatest salesman of his time.... But not as a philosopher-king or a serious political think, like all of those other presidents that he frequently quotes. They view him more or less as they would view Willie Loman if he had wandered through the looking glass and became president of the United States."

"Poor dear, there's nothing between his ears."

"He won the cold war without firing a shot."

"nothing but a bag of hot air."

"In America the 1980s were supposedly a rightward lurch, yet Reagan signed social security into law, established MLK day as a national holiday, heavily strengthened firearm restrictions, and did not curtail America’s public spending—choosing instead to use military spending as a form of economic stimulus. By standards of the previous era, Reagan was a consensus liberal—hardly a conservative. He shifted the Republican party towards the centreline of “acceptable politics,” and as such, narrowed what was and was not permissible on the political right."

"What do you do when your President ignores all the palpable, relevant facts and wanders in circles?"

"[A] lapse into fiscal indiscipline on a scale never before experienced in peacetime."

"After carefully watching Ronald Reagan, he is attempting a great breakthrough in political technology. He has been perfecting the Teflon-coated presidency. He sees to it that nothing sticks to him."

"[the proposal [would force literally hundreds of thousands of students to disrupt their graduate education."

"I am old enough to remember the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, when the government fought a "war on poverty." In recent years that war has been transformed by representatives of both major parties into a war on the poor. More important yet, but less reported, is that in the years since Ronald Reagan was elected president, corporate America has waged war against this nation's workers."

"Republicans in Washington love to talk about "welfare reform." They like to cite examples of low-income people without jobs who are "mooching" off the taxpayers of this country. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan focused on a "welfare queen" driving a Cadillac-who, it turned out, simply did not exist."

"It is a national tragedy that the number of incarcerated Americans has more than quadrupled since Ronald Reagan first ran on a "get tough on crime" platform-from about 500,000 in 1980 to more than 2.2 million today. And we spend $80 billion a year in federal, state, and local taxpayer dollars to lock them up."

"For many years, worker ownership enjoyed the support of both Republicans and Democrats. As Ronald Reagan said in 1987, "I can't help but believe that in the future we will see in the United States and throughout the Western world an increasing trend toward the next logical step: employee ownership. It is a path that befits a free people.""

"Emerging from a particularly credulous Southern California culture, Nancy and Ronald Reagan relied on an astrologer in private and public matters — unknown to the voting public. Some portion of the decision-making that influences the future of our civilization is plainly in the hands of charlatans."

"There was a time when the women of Afghanistan-at least in Kabul-were out there. They were allowed to study; they were doctors and surgeons, walking free, wearing what they wanted. That was when it was under Soviet occupation. Then the United States starts funding the mujahideen. Reagan called them Afghanistan's "founding fathers.""

"I have a pet theory, only somewhat in jest, that someday Donald Trump will become as respected as Ronald Reagan through this same process. Reagan, after all, illegally funded Latin American death squads, supported the racist apartheid regime in South Africa, and ignored AIDS as thousands of people died. (Asked about the epidemic, Reagan’s press secretary indicated that Reagan hadn’t paid the disease any attention and then began cracking jokes about it.) For all of this, Reagan is now voted in many public opinion polls as the greatest president in American history, possibly even the greatest American, period. The only way to keep future monsters from behaving as they please, knowing they will be eulogized as heroes, is to resist propaganda and tell the truth."

"It's ironic that the... one President the Democrats love to hate more than George W. Bush -- Ronald Wilson Reagan -- was actually the most responsible President we've had regarding nuclear weapons since Eisenhower. He sat down with Gorbachev and we got incredibly close to eliminating all nuclear weapons. We got rid of two classes of nuclear weapons and were moving in the direction of greater arms reduction... In terms of sheer numbers our nuclear arsenal kept growing. We'd eliminate one thing then make more of something else. It was a shell game.... Have we ever actually significantly reduced the number of nuclear arms with intent to permanently shrink the arsenal? Well no, not yet. But Reagan was at least moving in that direction. He's the only president who considered going down [in number of nuclear weapons]."

"Virtually every major move and decision the Reagans made during my time as White House Chief of Staff was cleared in advance with a woman in San Francisco who drew up horoscopes to make certain that the planets were in a favorable alignment for the enterprise."

"The frustration of dealing with a situation in which the schedule of the President of the United States was determined by occult prognostications was very great — far greater than any other I had known in nearly forty-five years of working life."

"Still, the price the United States paid during the Reagan years to "win" the Cold War was high. His decision to cut taxes while initiating the largest and most expensive peacetime military buildup in U.S. history, combined with Congress' refusal to cut domestic spending, contributed to an enormous increase in the national debt. Moreover, pressing domestic problems- the decline of the nation's infrastructure, the increase in crime, educational inequity, and others too numerous to list here- were ignored. Future generations will have to pay the bill for Reagan's "victory" in the Cold War. (p. 262)"

"Reagan may have had a genuine revulsion for nuclear weapons, but it was not at all obvious in the policies he adopted and pursued during his first and much of his second term. His disinclination to embrace détente was due to his own limited knowledge of nuclear weapons technology and strategy as well as his reluctance to offend the hard-liners in his administration, who had the expertise that the president lacked but not the same revulsion for nuclear weapons. Reagan had to be encouraged into running the risks of negotiating with the Soviets by his wife, Nancy Reagan, and by Secretary of State George Schultz. Public and congressional opinion also had much to do with Reagan's turnabout. The Democratic-controlled Congress made its continued support of pet administration military programs contingent on Reagan's willingness to negotiate seriously with the Soviets. The Congress, in turn, was influenced by an American public that was increasingly susceptible to the warnings of the anti-nuclear weapons movement about the perils of the Reagan military buildup. Neither Congress nor the American people gave much support to Reagan's crusade was weakened even more during his last two years in office by waning public and congressional support for large-scale defense increases and, above all, by the Iran-Contra affair, which threatened to destroy Reagan's presidency. In other words, Reagan needed a new approach to the Soviet Union. While he did not need a new U.S.-Soviet relationship as much as Gorbachev did, the revival of détente late in his presidency did win Reagan public accolades he sorely needed in the aftermath of the Iran-Contra affair. The Reagan-Gorbachev love-in was, in fact, an example of how necessity can make the strangest of bedfellows. Thanks to détente, and the unwillingness of Congress to press ahead with impeachment proceedings, Reagan left office as one of the most popular presidents in this century. (p. 261-262)"

"While Reagan was willing to improve relations with the Soviet Union, George Shultz must be given credit for the hard work and skill that was required to bring it off, in the face of much opposition from hard-liners within the administration. Yet it was neither Shultz nor Reagan, but rather Gorbachev, who made the major concessions that were needed to achieve success. The INF negotiations, for example, were concluded successfully primarily because of the concessions Gorbachev made, in the face of considerable opposition from hard-liners within his own government and military. (p. 261)"

"Others attribute the end of the Cold War to Reagan's desire to prevent a nuclear conflagration. This view asserts that the president never liked nuclear weapons as offensive instruments and that with his SDI program he demonstrated his disdain for deterrence, at least deterrence based on the mutual assured destruction doctrine (MAD). Reagan's goal to eliminate all offensive nuclear weapons, his supporters argue, made possible the INF treaty. Reagan failed to conclude a START treaty before he left office only because the Soviets refused to accept a defensive deterrent strategy, the basis of SDI, as a better alternative to MAD. However, not everyone, including this author, accepts the argument that the Reagan administration was primarily responsible for the end of the Cold War. In fact, probably no one, especially the president, expected that the administration's policies ultimately would cause the disintegration of the Soviet empire, at east not as quickly as it occurred. Said Reagan: "We meant to change a nation [the United States], and instead, we changed a world... All in all, not bad, not bad at all." More important as the cause of the Cold War's demise was the internal weakness of the Soviet Union, which, to be sure, the policies pursued by the Reagan administration exacerbated. By the time Reagan entered the White House, the Soviet economy had sunk into such a state of stagnation that it was obvious that communism had failed and a radically new approach was required. (p. 260-261)"

"The fact that, for all practical purposes, the Cold War ended during Ronald Reagan's presidency has led some to conclude that he was primarily responsible for the U.S. "victory" over the Soviet Union. The so-called Reagan victory school holds that his administration's military and ideological assertiveness during the 1980s was primarily responsible for the end of the Cold War, the demise of Communism in Europe, and ultimately the collapse of the Soviet Union itself. As the president put it on December 16, 1988, the changes taking place in the Soviet Union were in part the result of U.S. firmness, a strong defense, healthy alliances, and a willingness to use force when necessary. Moreover, as he boasted, he had been more than willing to point out the differences in the American and Soviet political systems at every opportunity. In addition, his supporters have asserted that the "full-court press" launched by the administration during Reagan's first term, which included a military buildup capped by SDI, the denial of technology to the Soviet Union, and the administration's counteroffensive in the Third World, delivered the "knock-out punch" to a system that was internally bankrupt "and on the ropes." (p. 260)"

"Like the overwhelming majority of America's Cold War presidents, Ronald Reagan entered the White House in January 1981 with almost no background in national security affairs. Before entering the political arena, he had been in movies and in television. His only direct military experience occurred during World War II, when he served in the armed forces making training and documentary films. His first and only elected political position prior to the presidency was the governorship of California, a position he held from 1966 to 1974. However, unlike most of his predecessors, Reagan was not particularly eager to master national security issues. This was demonstrated repeatedly during his presidency by his inability to explain them in any detail. (p. 231)"

"Reagan...was most definitely a global empire builder, a servant of the corporatocracy. At the time of his election, I found it fitting that he was a Hollywood actor, a man who had followed orders passed down from moguls, who knew how to take direction. That would be his signature. He would cater to the men who shuttled back and forth from corporate CEO offices to bank boards and into the halls of government. He would serve the men who appeared to serve him but who in fact ran the government — men like Vice President George H . W. Bush, Secretary of State George Shultz, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, Richard Cheney; Richard Helms, and Robert McNamara. He would advocate what those men wanted: an America that controlled the world and all its resources, a world that answered to the commands of that America, a U.S. military that would enforce the rules as they were written by America, and an international trade and banking system that supported America as CEO of the global empire."