People From New York City

"I can't talk very well but I want to say that this is the 'swellest' thing that ever happened to me. A heck of a lot sweller than getting the medal from the President."

"Early in the morning of 18 April 1945, he led his company through the shell-battered, sniper-infested wreckage of Nuremberg, Germany. When blistering machinegun fire caught his unit in an exposed position, he ordered his men to take cover, dashed forward alone, and, as bullets whined about him, shot the 3-man guncrew with his carbine. Continuing the advance at the head of his company, he located an enemy patrol armed with rocket launchers which threatened friendly armor. He again went forward alone, secured a vantage point and opened fire on the Germans. Immediately he became the target for concentrated machine pistol and rocket fire, which blasted the rubble about him. Calmly, he continued to shoot at the patrol until he had killed all 6 enemy infantrymen. Continuing boldly far in front of his company, he entered a park, where as his men advanced, a German machinegun opened up on them without warning. With his carbine, he killed the gunner; and then, from a completely exposed position, he directed machinegun fire on the remainder of the crew until all were dead. In a final duel, he wiped out a third machinegun emplacement with rifle fire at a range of 10 yards. By fearlessly engaging in 4 single-handed fire fights with a desperate, powerfully armed enemy, Lt. DALY, voluntarily taking all major risks himself and protecting his men at every opportunity, killed 15 Germans, silenced 3 enemy machineguns and wiped out an entire enemy patrol. His heroism during the lone bitter struggle with fanatical enemy forces was an inspiration to the valiant Americans who took Nuremberg"

"When things hang in the balance, it is the infantry that a country calls on. It falls on them to close with the enemy and decide the day... We lost some of our best people... They were often men who took the most chances and without whom you could never win a battle. They came from every walk of life- they represented the very best of my generation. You would have been proud to serve with them. As a platoon leader and company commander they sustained me then just as they sustain me now."

"Michael Daly entered West Point in 1942, but he left after one year to enlist as a private in the infantry. He trained in England and waded ashore on Omaha Beach on D-Day with the 1st Infantry Division, known as "the Big Red One." After moving through France and into Germany, Daly was wounded near Aachen; he recuperated in England, then returned to action assigned to the 3rd Infantry Division and was given a battlefield commission as a second lieutenant. Early on the morning of April 18, 1945, First Lieutenant Daly was in command of an infantry company moving through the rubble on the outskirts of Nuremberg, where bombed-out houses provided good cover for German snipers. As the Americans were going down the city's main thoroughfare, an enemy machine gun suddenly opened up from across a city square. As his men fell all around him, Daly charged the German position and killed the three-man crew with his carbine. Continuing on ahead of his unit, he came upon an enemy patrol armed with rocket launchers entrenched in the shell of a house and ready to ambush American tanks. He again opened fire with his carbine. Though the Germans responded by firing rockets, he held his ground and kept shooting until he had killed all six members of the patrol. As he continued to move ahead of his company, Daly entered what had been a city park. A German machine gun began firing from close range. When one of his men was killed, he picked up the soldier's rifle and used it to shoot both enemy gunners. In all, he killed fifteen Germans that afternoon and took out three machine-gun positions. The next day, as he was leading his company into action, Daly was shot in the face; the bullet entered at one ear and exited the opposite cheek. Falling to the ground, he felt that he might drown in his own blood until one of his men cleared his throat. Daly received medical treatment in England and in the States until mid-1946 but was well enough to travel to the White House on August 23, 1945, to receive the Medal of Honor from President Harry Truman. The next day, he was back home in Connecticut, riding in a motorcade. Alongside him was his father, Paul Daly, a World War I recipient of the Distinguished Service Cross who had twice been recommended for the Medal of Honor. The elder Daly had reentered the Army after Pearl Harbor, was severely wounded while serving as a regimental commander in northern France, and was sent back to the States to recuperate. Sitting next to him that day, Michael wished his father had received the medal he was wearing around his neck."

"April 18 was the second day of the attack. Daly was scouting a rail bridge that led into the city when a German machine gun caught him and his men in the open. He charged forward, running to within fifty yards of the Germans before he opened fire with his carbine and killed the three gunners. He again pushed ahead of his company, advancing on a house that contained a German antitank gun. In the words of one of his men, he was "taking his life in his hands and we all knew it." As he worked his way to the house, rifle fire kicked up the dust around him. With only his carbine, Daly killed all six Germans manning the antitank equipment. Then, when he saw a long-time friend fall in the assault, Daly, in "hot blood," twice more led attacks on German machine-gun positions, each time moving to within pointblank range while directing the fire of his troops on the Germans. At one critical point, he seized a discarded M1, crawled forward to within ten yards of a German machine-gun nest, and killed the Gunners, securing the position. Daly was wounded badly in the face the following day. Once he recovered he was shipped home. Like so many medal recipients, Daly refused to see his award as a testament to individual heroism. "The medal is very important to me..." he later said, "to insure the memory of those who died.""

"Some people blame their misfortunes on it. It must be put in perspective. It is a purely personal thing. Your country does not owe you anything because you received this medal. After all, it was my [good] fortune that somebody wasn't shooting straight."

"Everyone has a breaking point. You have a reservoir, but it can dry up if you are in combat too long. If a person had been in combat too long, he deserved some special consideration."

"It was one of those hot days and it got to be about a hundred degrees, and old Mike just got fed up and threw his books in the corner, and said, 'See ya later, Doc, I'm going to war.' Next thing we heard, he was in Italy with the 3rd Division, where he later was awarded the Medal of Honor and received a battlefield promotion."

"You've got to be careful. You can become a professional hero. There's an awful sadness with that. You spend your life going from ceremony to ceremony. You have to move on. Life is a long-distance race. If too much of your life is centered on things you did early- there's a sadness. You can only stand up and hear what you did a few times. It's something you did at one time. There is also an embarrassment about the killing aspect. You don't want to be known for killing."

"The individual is better, society is better, and the state is better, for the culture of its citizens; therefore we desire to extend the means for the culture of all."

"Alumni, of course, were in the military from the very earliest stages of the war, some even before Pearl Harbor. By early 1943 over two hundred alumni were on active duty and a year later this figure had climbed to four hundred. Occasionally an alumnus would return to the School and invariably end up by speaking to the assembled student body and providing a firsthand account of action in the theater from which he had come. Notices of service awards to alumni were read. (The Prep could boast of a Medal of Honor awardee in Michael Daly '41.) And sadly, word would inevitably arrive, from time to time, of a death in action. (More than a dozen alumni were to give their lives before VJ Day)."

"One thinks, “Well, these are savages. They wear red paint and feather loin cloths, so they’re not people.” But they’re exactly the same species as we are, except they are behaving the way we all evolved to behave. We, on the other hand, are mistreated as infants and children, treated inappropriately for our species. As a result, we keep re-creating an anti-social population. Nobody’s born rotten. You just don’t have bad kids. It’s not true. There is no such thing. But we can make them bad. Ironically, the reason it’s possible to make these profoundly social animals bad or anti-social is because we are so social."

"The anthropologist without portfolio was Jean Liedloff, and she couldn’t help puzzling over what could be setting these kids so strikingly apart from any Western children in her experience. The mothering practices of the Yequana women suddenly came into focus. Liedloff observed that the Yequana, unlike most Western mothers, were in constant physical contact with their babies until the babies started moving around on their own. By day mothers carried their babies in slings. This way the baby had access to the breast and could nurse at will. By night each family shared a single sleeping place, allowing the baby’s attachment to the mother to proceed uninterrupted. Liedloff also noticed that the babies were not the center of their mothers’ attention."

"In the two and a half years during which I lived among Stone Age Indians in the South American jungle (not all at once, but on five separate expeditions with a lot of time between them for reflection), I came to see that our human nature is not what we have been brought up to believe it is. Babies of the Yequana tribe, far from needing peace and quiet to go to sleep, snoozed blissfully whenever they were tired, while the men, women, or children carrying them danced, ran, walked, shouted, or paddled canoes. Toddlers played together without fighting or arguing, and they obeyed their elders instantly and willingly."

"The notion of punishing a child had apparently never occurred to these people, nor did their behavior show anything that could truly be called permissiveness. No child would have dreamed of inconveniencing, interrupting, or being waited on by an adult. And by the age of four, children were contributing more to the work force in their family than they were costing others."

"Our parents, our tribesman, our authority figures, clearly expect us to be bad or anti-social or greedy or selfish or dirty or destructive or self-destructive. Our social nature is such that we tend to meet the expectations of our elders. Whenever this reversal took place and our elders stopped expecting us to be social and expected us to be anti-social, just to put it in gross terms, that’s when the real fall took place. And we’re paying for it dearly. Just imagine the neurotic and psychopathic people that we have become. Why do we have a 50% divorce rate? Why do we have so many police? It’s not just Americans, it’s the whole of Western civilization laboring under a misapprehension of what human nature truly is. That’s what I learned from my experiences."

"So, Mikhail Sergeyevich was a deep democrat. He was a social democrat. It’s interesting, out of the Communist Party, one party, he emerged social democrat. He introduced the fairest and freest presidential and parliamentary elections to Russia.... he finally saw in Ukraine — and, by the way, Nina Khrushcheva knows this very well. Raisa was half-Ukrainian, I think, and Gorbachev has family, Ukrainian. He despaired of the war in Ukraine. And I think, in that, he saw that Putin was — you know, he’s the Russian, Soviet — he’s the Russian statist. He’s anti-communist. He is the Russian myth, the Russian world. And Gorbachev was, you know, a social democrat of a more European kind... One thing that Gorbachev always said — and I’ll end here — at the end of the Cold War — and this is something that was shared by George H.W. Bush at the beginning — there was no winner. There was no winner. But the triumphalism of America, I think, in the end, opened Gorbachev’s eyes to the dangers of making agreements with the West, which would be broken, as was the promise not to move NATO eastward, a broken promise which was a stab in the back against Gorbachev’s policies and success."

"I think what we’ve seen, Amy, over these last years is that the corporate media has a one-sided debate. You don’t hear from informed, analytical scholars or writers who are not there to justify but to provide history and context about what we’re witnessing today in the proxy war, but the war between Ukraine and Russia. And there’s a marginalization of those voices and a preference for voices which are about how to escalate the war, how to cover the military, not cover the history. And I think the venerable journalist Walter Lippmann once said, “When all think alike, no one thinks very much.” And that seems to be the framework in what we’re witnessing. And I think it’s very important that there’s not an intellectual no-fly zone, even while understanding how barbaric, how illegal the Russian war against Ukraine is."

"Director Avril Haines has earned a stellar reputation of bipartisan collaboration and deep expertise. Many of you worked with her when she served as Deputy Director at the CIA and the Principal Deputy National Security Advisor during the Obama Administration. And the agency she now oversees have been the consequential players as the free world counters Russian aggression. In the days leading up to Putin's vicious assault on democracy, the United States Intelligence Community over and over accurately and precisely predicted his every move and revealed his intentions. That public use of intelligence exposed false flag operations, it built trust in America's warnings, it united our allies, and it gave the Ukrainians greater time to prepare."

"Last month, when US National Intelligence Director Avril Haines presented the intelligence community’s annual threat assessment to the Senate Intelligence Committee, committee members praised her for the “excellent work” leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and for “continuing to keep us informed.” To the US intelligence community’s credit, and to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s chagrin, US senators weren’t the only ones kept informed. The rest of the world was, too, thanks to thorough strategic US intelligence disclosures. Making intelligence public is more art than science, and spies and analysts have struggled to master it. But when it comes to Ukraine, CIA Director William Burns deserves recognition for changing how the agency thinks about revealing its secrets. A former ambassador to Moscow, Burns told the Senate committee that, “In all the years I spent as a career diplomat, I saw too many instances in which we lost information wars with the Russians.”"

"Yes, I think the survey is indicating that there's a lack or the trust in the military, not the Intelligence Community, but I do think that we also have a challenge with public trust in the Intelligence Community. And honestly, we’ve seen for years public trust deteriorating in public institutions more broadly. This is something that's happening in the United States, and also in Europe... I mean I think coming in it was one, from my perspective, one of the key priorities, is can we increase public trust in the Intelligence Community? And I see it as fundamental, frankly, to our mission. Which is to say that when we have an opportunity to warn the public about threats and challenges that we're facing as a country, I'm hoping that they will actually believe what we're saying, right?"

"I mean we're not going to be as effective if they don't have trust in us and we're also not going to get the best people coming to the Intelligence Community if they don't trust us. ...We are not doing everything perfectly. We understand that. We see problems too. We're going to try to correct it. We do sometimes needs space for people to say, okay, you're doing something that is totally unacceptable, but okay, you've admitted to it. Now, let's actually fix it and get better and work on that."

"Most Americans have never heard of her, because the U.S. corporate media's foreign policy coverage is a wasteland. Most Americans have no idea that President-elect Biden's pick for deputy secretary of state for political affairs is stuck in the quicksand of 1950s U.S.-Russia Cold War politics and dreams of continued NATO expansion, an arms race on steroids and further encirclement of Russia. Nor do they know that from 2003 to 2005, during the hostile U.S. military occupation of Iraq, Nuland was a foreign policy advisor to Dick Cheney, the Darth Vader of the Bush administration. You can bet, however, that the people of Ukraine have heard of neocon Nuland. Many have even heard the leaked four-minute audio of her saying "F--- the EU" during a February 2014 phone call with the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt."

"The "F--- the EU" call went viral, as an embarrassed State Department, never denying the call's authenticity, blamed the Russians for tapping the phone, much as the NSA has tapped the phones of European allies. Despite outrage from German Chancellor Angela Merkel, no one fired Nuland, but her potty mouth upstaged the more serious story: the U.S. plot to overthrow Ukraine's elected government — and America's responsibility for a civil war that has killed at least 13,000 people and left Ukraine the poorest country in Europe. In the process, Nuland, her husband Robert Kagan — co-founder of The Project for a New American Century — and their neocon cronies succeeded in sending U.S.-Russian relations into a dangerous downward spiral from which they have yet to recover."

"More recently, Victoria Nuland expressed satisfaction at the demise of the newest of the pipelines. Testifying at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in late January she told Senator Ted Cruz, "Like you, I am, and I think the Administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.""

"It has been an enormous interagency effort, but it’s also taught a whole new generation of American diplomats what it takes to rally global support in defense of democracy, what it feels like to be part of an endeavor that is absolutely existential for the world that they are going to live in going forward."

"Because I had seen our best efforts to forestall a violent choice by Putin fail in ’14, I was more prepared than many... Everybody at the beginning was relatively skeptical — with the exception of the Canadians and the U.K., ...that he would actually take this step. The fact that we found the [Russian war] plans when we did — and they were as robust as they were... gave us the time that we needed to prepare. A lot of us were veterans of 2014, ’15 and ’16, and felt that if we had done more faster then to help Ukraine, we might have had a better result... The day of was this horrible, awful realization that he had not bluffed... We were preparing for many scenarios in which the Ukrainians essentially had to get Kyiv back...We didn’t know which scenario we were going to be looking at... There were many things we were expecting that actually didn’t happen... None of us expected the Ukrainians to be able to withstand as strongly as they did in those first four or five days... All of a sudden, we realized that Ukraine — and particularly the government, the leadership, the capital — might be able to resist... we began to become more optimistic that if we helped Ukraine as much as we possibly could, that the country might survive."

"Ukraine has biological research facilities, which in fact, we are now quite concerned Russian troops, Russian forces may be seeking to gain control of, so we are working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces should they approach."

"While our diplomats have returned from Kabul, as you know and we’ve officially suspended our presence there, our ongoing intensive diplomatic work with partners and allies in Afghanistan continues. First of all, as you know, it is this department and the Secretary’s top priority to continue to evacuate any American citizen who wishes to leave Afghanistan. We believe there are between 100 and 200 Americans who remain in Afghanistan who may have some interest in leaving, and the Secretary is leading our diplomatic efforts to ensure safe passage for them and for any Afghan partners and foreign nationals who still want to leave Afghanistan. And as the President said, there is no deadline on the effort to ensure safe passage for those who want it. Within this building, the Afghan task force continues to work 24/7 on evacuation efforts. And since August of – August 14th, the task force has been engaging American citizens in Afghanistan. They’ve made more than 55,000 phone calls, sent more than 33,000 emails, and this outreach continues today and will in the days and weeks ahead as long as there is a need."

"I think that's most important is that we are listening to the Ukrainians as this war changes. Russia, as you know, is now planning to mass its forces from the east and come in heavy that way, which changes what they need. They need our -- heavy artillery. They need long range rocket systems. They need anti-ship missiles of the kind that they were able to use on the Russian ship in the Black Sea, the Moskva, their flagship, just a couple of days ago. And that's what we and our allies are assembling and continuing to get into Ukraine as these Ukrainians fight so bravely for their freedom, but also for the principle of freedom and sovereignty for all of us.... What I would say is, as you -- as you made clear at the top of your story, the United States has provided more than $3 billion worth of weapons to Ukraine. Our allies have matched that. So, double that amount over the course of this year. We were also the first to warn that Russia would invade Ukraine, starting as far back as late October, November. I think even the Ukrainians couldn't imagine the horror of what is happening now. But I think it's a direct result, not only of their bravery and their courage and their skill on the battlefield, but the fact that we've been working with them and training them, as have other NATO allies, for some eight years that they are able to stand up to the onslaught of the Russian army."

"The latest Foreign Affairs(magazine) features a piece by former Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, “Pinning Down Putin: How a Confidant America Should Deal With Russia.” A protege of former secretaries of state Madeleine Albright and Hillary Clinton, she is a notorious “liberal interventionist,”... perhaps best known for aiding the neofascist putsch in Ukraine in February 2014 that produced regime change, a revolt in Ukraine’s east, the Russian seizure of Crimea, and Hunter Biden getting offered a seat on the board of Ukraine’s largest gas company making $50,000 a month for three years.... Nuland’s notion of “robust defense” is really one of world domination. She has not concluded from the U.S. experiences in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and elsewhere that all U.S. military action produces is mass hatred of the oppressor and general failure. She praises in her article Trump’s decision to retain U.S. forces illegally in Syria to prevent the Syrians from using their own oil. She’s still not given up on Hillary’s cherished dream of regime change, a la Libya. You’d think with her record on intervention she’d be shunned by thinking people. But no, Nuland’s on MSNBC as we speak, treated deferentially. Is she running for a cabinet post? Nuland’s Republican husband declined to endorse Trump in 2016, labeling him a “fascist” (as has Albright) and voting for Hillary. They both perhaps see futures in a Biden administration."

"Few nations elicit such fatalism among American policymakers and analysts as Vladimir Putin’s Russia. For some, the country is an irredeemable pariah state, responsive only to harsh punishment and containment. Others see a wronged and resurgent great power that deserves more accommodation. Perspectives vary by the day, the issue, and the political party. Across the board, however, resignation has set in about the state of U.S.-Russian relations, and Americans have lost confidence in their own ability to change the game. But today’s Russia is neither monolithic nor immutable."

"I would say it starts with showing up, which is what we’re doing today – coming to Africa, engaging here with our partners both in government and the NGO sector and in the business sector to talk about what more we can do together. But it is also, as I said at the – during the opening, about embedding our Africa strategy in our larger strategy to strengthen the democracies, strengthen our partnerships, strengthen our multilateral approach to common challenges, whether they are health challenges, economic challenges, or security challenges, and to do them together; and also, to encourage and support African-led efforts to solve African problems, again, whether they’re in the security realm or whether they’re working to integrate economies, build infrastructure, recover from COVID, all of those kinds of things. So that’s how – those are the – that’s the main difference. I think you will likely see President Biden invite African leaders to convene sometime in 2022. You’ll see a lot more travel. I am the appetizer – let’s put it that way – and hopefully folk who are even – who are more senior than I am, we are laying the table here."

"The Myth of the Frontier is our oldest and most characteristic myth, expressed in a body of literature, folklore, ritual, historiography, and polemics produced over a period of three centuries. According to this mythic-historiography, the conquest of the wilderness and the subjugation or displacement of the Native Americans who originally inhabited it have been the means to our achievement of a national identity, a democratic polity, an ever-expanding economy, and a phenomenally dynamic and ‘progressive’ civilization.1"

"A crucial embellishment of the origin myth and key element of the national identity has been the myth of the frontier, analyzed in Richard Slotkin's Gunfighter Nation (1992), the last volume of a fascinating trilogy."

"He's a terrible human being. He does not deserve to be in the House of Representatives. He deserves to be in a federal prison. And I think the issue of expulsion is going to be something that a lot of my colleagues are going to talk about."

"The future is endless, you just never know. You can do whatever you want next, and I’m just going to do whatever I want."

"Why would I want to stay here? To hell with this place."

"He’s disgraced the House of Representatives, and we do not consider him one of our congresspeople. Today, on behalf of the Nassau County Republican Committee, I am calling for his immediate resignation."

"The most recent obsession from the media claiming that I am a drag Queen or "performed" as a drag Queen is categorically false. The media continues to make outrageous claims about my life while I am working to deliver results. I will not be distracted nor fazed by this."

"No, I was not a drag queen in Brazil, guys. I was young and I had fun at a festival. Sue me for having a life."

"Well guess what? Rosa Parks didn't sit in the back and neither am I going to sit in the back."

"I was at the Ellipse on January 6th. That was the most amazing crowd, and the president was at his full awesomeness that day, it was a front row spectacle for me."

"I'm a gay married man, I am openly gay, have never had an issue with my sexual identity in the past decade, and I can tell you and assure you, I will always be an advocate for LGBTQ folks."

"My grandfather fleeing Ukraine in 1920s to Belgium, and fleeing Belgium to Brazil in 1940. It's a story of survival, of tenacity, of grit, as we like to call it. My mother migrated to the United States in search of the American Dream, as I said today, I am her American Dream."

"I'm not a fraud. I'm not a criminal who defrauded the entire country and made up this fictional character and ran for Congress."

"I am not a criminal. Not here, not abroad, in any jurisdiction in the world have I ever committed any crimes."

"I never claimed to be Jewish. I am Catholic. Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background I said I was Jew-ish."

"All of us in this room can agree that when we look at slavery, it was barbaric. Fifty years from now, we’re going to look back at what we’re doing in this country and we are going to say ‘we killed babies out of the womb? We aborted our own? That is barbaric.'"

"The digital world is the future."