Journalists From The United States

"I am often wrong. For example, I liked Cop Rock, voted for Nader, and used to think that the preeminent philosophical question of the late twentieth century was whether the government intelligence agency or the semi-attached policy-studies think tank represented America's best hope for a viable pluralism. But I may be right, after all, about Stephen King and Walt Disney. No matter how often King shows up on ABC, they haven't yet figured out how to merchandise his dread, how to turn his intuitions and intimations into action figures and fast-food tie-ins and Davy Crockett coonskin caps. It's homemade versus mass-manufactured; bootleg versus theme park; Cujo versus Mickey Mouse."

"Maybe the unconscious is overrated... What if your unconscious is full of false consciousness or bad faith? What if it's more like a trash compactor than a dreamcatcher? What if it's a diseased hump, a vampire bat, an alien abductor? Somewhere in Pieces and Pontifications, somebody asked him: "Why can't the unconscious be as error-prone as the conscious?" It was a Freudian question he never answered."

"The words, the style always reflects a habit of mind. And the habit of mind comes in from a different angle. The habit of mind uses the colloquial here and uses the joke there. And then creates some discordant music and then something strange and wonderful happens. And you see things differently. You see a different light is shed on it."

"The culture as a whole is losing its individual notes, its diversity. And this is… it's not only sad. It's devastating. It's devastating because routine language means routine thought. And it means unquestioning thought. It means if I can't — if new words cannot occur to me and new image does not occur to me, then what I'm doing is I'm simply repeating what I've heard. And what we hear from an overpowering cultural force and the forces of homogenization, what we hear is sell, sell, buy, buy. That's it. That is the function."

"I don't have a sense of sanctuary. I don't have a place where I think I can go. I once went to the famous Kyoto temple with the Zen garden, the gravel, the little mounds and it's, you know, it's been pictured over and over and over again. And what they don't tell you is that this little acre or some acre of serenity is surrounded by millions of people taking pictures. So it sounds like a storm of mosquitoes constantly. And it never stops. And there's no serenity. And so not even in Japan can I find sanctuary."

"The life, no matter how traumatic, never explains the work, if the work is any good. W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Doris Lessing, and Saul Bellow variously believed in faeries, funny money, flying saucers, and orgone energy accumulation, but so have millions of other people who never got around to writing even a mediocre poem or novel."

"Where did all the liberals go? If the gringos in their villas dream at all, it's of sugar-plum stock options. Never mind social justice, what happened to habeas corpus? Faith-based globocops police the words in our mouths and the behaviors in our bed while sorehead cable blabbercasters rant them on. Blood lust, wet dreams, collateral damage and extraordinary rendition; Halliburton and Abu Ghraib; an erotics of property, a theology of greed and a holy war on the poor, the old, the sick, the odd and the other — when oh when will the Tatzelwurm turn?"

"My whole life I have been waving the names of writers, as if we needed rescue. From these writers, for almost 50 years, I have received narrative, witness, companionship, sanctuary, shock, and steely strangeness; good advice, bad news, deep chords, hurtful discrepancy, and amazing grace. At an average of five books a week, not counting all those sighed at and nibbled on before they go to the Strand, I will read 13,000. Then I'm dead. Thirteen thousand in a lifetime, about as many as there are new ones published every month in this country. It's not enough, and yet rich to excess. The books we love, love us back. In gratitude, we should promise not to cheat on them — not to pretend we're better than they are; not to use them as target practice, agit prop, trampolines, photo ops or stalking horses; not to sell out scruple to that scratch-and-sniff infotainment racket in which we posture in front of experience instead of engaging it, and fidget in our cynical opportunism for an angle, a spin, or a take, instead of consulting compass points of principle, and strike attitudes like matches, to admire our wiseguy profiles in the mirrors of the slicks. We are reading for our lives, not performing like seals for some fresh fish."

"Prisons are a growth industry in a country that has stopped building schools because we would rather not pay our property taxes. And we seem remarkably comfortable with a criminal-justice system that locks up and "disappears" people we fear or hold in contempt — with prisons as closets to hide our unmentionables and as factories for processing spare human parts until there is nothing left but waste."

"You marry to be worthy of a gift, and want to say so out loud, but without shouting. One doesn't shout a prayer. Marriage is one of the few ceremonies left to us about which it is impossible — or at least self-demeaning — to be cynical."

"Granted, religion is wishful thinking, but there is no other kind of thinking."

"One advantage of remorse is that it sets the stage for consolation."

"We are getting to be of an age when it is difficult to grow new friends; we haven't the energy, the time to cultivate; each one gone is a permanent impoverishment."

"In God's body shop, each of us was customized. But science came along to substitute statistical inference for free will. We are now a tribe of likelihoods."

"Suppose, deep down, you suspect that you are dull, and your public works are a form of vengeance. You talk a good poem, and think by numbers. Once upon a time, you were interesting; then Mother died and you had to give it up."

"Every fall I imagine once again that something wonderful will happen at a party. This is like imagining that the telephone book will prove to be a wonderful novel."

"When the state murders, it assumes an authority I refuse to concede: the authority of perfect knowledge in final things."

"A bohemian imitates the manners of the class below him."

"In our brave new world, blushing is a form of nostalgia."

"You can't invent yourself as you maunder on. Your fabrications aren't going to impress the blood test, the urinalysis or the chest X-ray. Science is not amused."

"To be capable of embarrassment is the beginning of moral consciousness. Honor grows from qualms."

"Isn't it amazing the way the future succeeds in creating an appropriate past?"

"Somewhere in the Bill of Rights is a Pig Amendment; our freedom to stuff ourselves cannot be abridged. Having so stuffed, we demand a technological solution to the fat problem. Give me cyclamates, or give me death! This is not only immoral; it is also boring."

"Monotheism was a terrible idea, leading directly to Lenin."

"It may be that the Greeks had it easy, with their light and their mountains and their plains and their islands waiting around for tourists. It was easy for them to believe that man fit in rather well. This fittingness may have given them the idea that we are seemlier than other evidence suggests. The heads of Rameses II at Abu Simbel and, for that matter, the skyscrapers of New York, have another idea of man. So do the artifacts of Albert Speer. It is depressing to wonder whether the Greeks just happened to be lucky, and the dream they left us is a lie about ourselves."

"If all the world must see the world As the world the world hath seen, Then it were better for the world That the world had never been."

"The brave deserve the lovely—every woman may be won."

"They saw a Dream of Loveliness descending from the train."

"Hans Breitmann gife a barty— Where ish dat barty now?"

"Some people have said Brother Khalid was a villain, but we know he was a victim in a world that is evil. Racism and injustice are the real villains here."

"We don't owe the white man nothing in South Africa. He's killed millions of our women, our children, our babies, our elders.… If he won't get out of town by sundown, we kill everything white that ain't right that's in sight in South Africa. We kill the women, we kill the children, we kill the babies. We kill the blind, we kill the crippled, we kill them all … and kill them a-god-damn-gain because they didn't die hard enough."

"Who are the slumlords in the Black community? The so-called Jews... Who is it sucking our blood in the Black community? A white imposter Arab and a white imposter Jew."

"When white folks can't defeat you they'll always find some Negro—some boot-licking, butt-licking, buck-dancing, bamboozled, half-baked, half-fried, sissified, punkified, pasteurized, homogenized nigger—that they can trot out in front of you."

"The white race is absolutely disagreeable to get along with in peace. No other people on the face of the earth have been able to get along with white people since white people have been on our planet."

"Look these bastards in the eyes, and if anyone attacks you, already decide who will be the one to disconnect the railing where you are, and beat the hell out of them, the no-good bastards! And if you don't have a gun, every one of them has one gun, two guns, maybe three guns. In self-defense, if they attack you, take their goddamn guns from them and use their guns on them! In self-defense. Giuliani is known for taking his police and sending them off in riots. If any one of these bastards riots here today, you take their nightstick the way they did brother Abner Louima and ram it up their behind and jam it down their damn throats!"

"Tell us you lost 6 million. Historians, scholars, scientists, they went to some of the death camps. It wasn't 6 million, it wasn't 5 million, it wasn't 4 million, it wasn't even 3 million. Some of them say we'd be hard-pressed to get 1 1/2 million. Reports on the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis were bloated, exaggerated, probably fabricated."

"I say you call yourself Goldstein, Silverstein, and Rubinstein because you're stealing all the gold and silver and rubies all over the earth — and it's true, because of your thieving and stealing and roguing, and lying all over the face of the planet earth."

"Now it is time to stand up and fight back.… There are no good crackers, and if you find one, kill him before he changes."

"Give me a black goddess sister, I can't resist her! No stringy haired, blonde haired, blue eyed, pale skinned, buttermilk complexion, grafted recessive, depressive, ironing board backside, straight-up and straight down, no frills, no thrills, Miss 6 o'clock, subject to have the itch, mutanoid, caucasoid, white cave bitch!"

"The South is blameless; for she holds in fee The stainless swords of Washington and Lee."

"Gentlest and bravest in the battle-brunt, The Champion of the Truth; He won his banner in the very front Of our immortal youth."

"The despot’s heel is on thy shore, Maryland! His torch is at thy temple-door, Maryland! Avenge the patriotic gore That flecked the streets of Baltimore, And be the battle-queen of yore, Maryland! My Maryland!"

"Hushed in the alabaster arms of Death Our young Marcellus sleeps."

"Muhammad was the flip side to Bull Connor. The alter ego of a grand dragon. He was the mirror's image of generations of white bigots who irrationally painted all African Americans with a single broad, racist stroke. And as with the passing of all of his white counterparts, I offer Khalid Abdul Muhammad a simple eulogy: Good riddance."

"He has in his life and his death brought us together. That is one of his greatest legacies: that he has brought us together from all segments of the African world.… He was a constant soldier, a warrior … He wanted power for black people. That's why he reaffirmed what we taught in the sixties: Black power! … He believed we have a right to self-determination — as our organization US said — self-determination, self-respect and self-defense."

"I found the speech, after listening to it in context, vile in manner, repugnant, malicious, mean-spirited and spoken in mockery of individuals and people, which is against the spirit of Islam. While I stand by the truths that he spoke, I must condemn in the strongest terms the manner in which those truths were represented."

"Around the country, ideas that originated on the hard right or in the fevered imaginations of conspiracy theorists are finding their way into the mainstream. In a number of cases, these ideas have become commonplace in American minds."

"Berlet is professional political hit man whose specialty is smearing anyone outside the traditional left-right categories as an extremist, at best, and a nascent Nazi at worst. He and his organization have been a veritable fountainhead of anti-Fulani material, which details the political history of Fulani and her group from a leftist perspective. In Berlet’s view, Fulani endorsing Buchanan is a betrayal of leftist principles, a sell-out that does not augur well for the left."

"Berlet is really saying that he loves the plutocrats and considers any expose of their crimes to be a fascist conspiracy."

"The political Right currently runs the country. That's very annoying, but pretending it isn't true is foolhardy. What is really annoying is that in the late 1970s some of us were giving speeches and writing articles explaining that rightists intended to take over the country. It wasn't hard to figure that out, since at the same time right-wing ideologues and strategists were also giving speeches and writing articles describing in elaborate detail how they planned to do it. Well, they did it."