Journalists From The United States

"Scheana, You weren't dying. You were in the dentist's office."

"Oh, My God, Scheana looks like two butterflies landed on her eyelashes and shit a Crayon."

"You were in the dentist's office. You got a lollipop and a toothbrush when it was over."

"Scheana looks like a cross between a Gypsy and one of those American Girl dolls. So long, Scheana. So Long Scheana's Eyelashes. So long, Scheana's Turban. So long, Scheana's Unitards."

"It is one thing to commit crimes against property, and a vastly different thing to commit crimes in behalf of property. Such is the edict of a system inspired by the sway of property."

"Ambition, enterprise, effort and success are largely states of mind; happiness is the United States."

"I've long since lost my taste for good coffee," he says. "I much prefer the kind that sooner or later, if you keep on drinking it, your hands will begin to shake and the whites of your eyes will turn yellow."

"My grandfather used to like the word 'mitigate,'" Harry said. "He liked the sound of it, and he used it whenever he could. When he was a very old man, he often got on the subject of dying. 'You cant talk your way out,' he'd often say, 'and you can't buy your way out, and you can't shoot your way out, and the only thing that mitigates the matter in the slightest is the fact that nobody else is going to escape. Nobody — no, not one.'" "I know, I know," said Mr. Hewitt, "but what's the purpose of it?" "You supported your wife, didn't you?" asked Harry. "You raised a family, didn't you? That's the purpose of it." "That's no purpose," said Mr. Hewitt. "The same thing that's going to happen to me is going to happen to them." "The generations have to keep coming along," said Harry. "That's all I know." "You're put here, " said Mr. Hewitt, "and you're allowed to eat and draw breath and go back and forth a few short years, and about the time you get things in shape where you can sit down and enjoy them you wind up in a box in a hole in the ground, and as far as I can see, there's no purpose to it whatsoever."

"Even today, I sometimes get really quite painfully homesick for Norwood. A sour smell that reminds me of the tanneries will bring it on, such as the smell from a basement down in the Italian part of the Village where some old Italian is making wine. That's one of the damnedest things I ever found out about human emotions and how treacherous they can be — the fact that you can hate a place with all your heart and soul and still be homesick for it. Not to speak of the fact that you can hate a person with all your heart and soul and still long for that person."

"We get a lot of goormies in Libby's," said Mr. Murchison. "I can spot a goormy right off. Moment he sits down he wants to know do we have any boolybooze." "Bouillabaisse," said Mr. Flood. "Yes," said Mr. Murchison, "and I tell him, 'Quit showing off! We don't carry no boolybooze. Never did. There's a time and a place for everything. If you was to go into a restaurant in France,' I ask him, 'would you call for some Daniel Webster fish chowder?' I love a hearty eater, but I do despise a goormy. All they know is boolybooze and pompano and something that's out of season, nothing else will do. And when they get through eating they don't settle their check and go on about their business. No, they sit there and deliver you a lecture on what they et, how good it was, how it was almost as good as a piece of fish they had in the Caffy dee lah Pooty-doo in Paris, France, on January 16, 1928; they remember every meal they ever et, or make out they do. And every goormy I ever saw is an expert on herbs. Herbs, herbs, herbs! If you let one get started on the subject of herbs he'll talk you deef, dumb, and blind. Way I feel about herbs, on any fish I ever saw, pepper and salt and a spoon of melted butter is herbs aplenty."

"You're a trouble-maker. What race do you belong to, anyhow?" "The human race," I said. "I come from the womb and I'm bound for the tomb, the same as you, the same as King George the Six, the same as Johnny Squat."

"When things get too much for me, I put a wild-flower book and a couple of sandwiches in my pockets and go down to the South Shore of Staten Island and wander around awhile in one of the old cemeteries down there."

"I was young then, and much more courteous to older people — and to everyone else, for that matter, as I look back on it — than I should have been. Also, I had not yet found out about time; I was still under the illusion that I had plenty of time — time for this, time for that, time for everything, time to waste."

"The trembly fellow sighed and said, "I'm all out of whack. I'm going uptown and see my doctor." Mr. Flood snorted again. "Oh, shut up," he said. "Damn your doctor! I tell you what you do. You get right out of here and go over to Libby’s oyster house and tell the man you want to eat some of his big oysters. Don’t sit down. Stand up at that fine marble bar they got over there, where you can watch the man knife them open. And tell him you intend to drink the oyster liquor; he'll knife them on the cup shell, so the liquor won't spill. And be sure you get the big ones. Get them so big you'll have to rear back to swallow, the size that most restaurants use for fries and stews; God forgive them, they don't know any better. Ask for Robbins Islands, Mattitucks, Cape Cods, or Saddle Rocks. And don't put any of that red sauce on them, that cocktail sauce, that mess, that gurry. Ask the man for half a lemon, poke it a time or two to free the juice, and squeeze it over the oysters. And the first one he knifes, pick it up and smell it, the way you'd smell a rose, or a shot of brandy. That briny, seaweedy fragrance will clear your head; it'll make your blood run faster. And don't just eat six; take your time and eat a dozen, eat two dozen, eat three dozen, eat four dozen. And then leave the man a generous tip and go buy yourself a fifty-cent cigar and put your hat on the side of your head and take a walk down to Bowling Green. Look at the sky! Isn't it blue? And look at the girls a-tap-tap-tapping past on their pretty little feet! Aren't they just the finest girls you ever saw, the bounciest, the rumpiest, the laughingest? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself for even thinking about spending good money on a damned doctor? And along about here, you better be careful. You're apt to feel so bucked-up you'll slap strangers on the back, or kick a window in, or fight a cop, or jump on the tailboard of a truck and steal a ride.""

"I'm immune to the average germ; don't even catch colds; haven't had a cold since 1912. Only reason I caught that one, I went on a toot and it was a pouring-down rainy night in the dead of winter and my shoes were cracked and they let the damp in and I lost my balance a time or two and sloshed around in the gutter and somewhere along the line I mislaid my hat and I'd just had a haircut and I stood in a draft in one saloon an hour or more and there was a poor fellow next to me sneezing his head off and when I got home I crawled into a bed that was beside an open window like a fool and passed out with my wet clothes on, shoes and all. Also, I'd spent the night before sitting up on a train and hadn't slept a wink and my resistance was low. If the good Lord can just see His way clear to protect me from accidents, no stumbling on the stairs, no hell-fired automobiles bearing down on me in the dark, no broken bones, I'll hit a hundred and fifteen easy."

"He had a habit of remarking to bartenders that he didn’t see any sense in mixing whiskey with water, since the whiskey was already wet."

"As the young reporter listens, it dawns on him that it is not the South that he longs for but the past, the South's past and his own past, neither of which, in the way that he has been driven by homesickness to think of them, ever really existed, and that it is time for him to move out of the time gone by and into the here and now — it is time for him to grow up. When the sermon is over, he goes back downtown feeling that the old man has set him free, and that he is now a citizen of the city and a citizen of the world."

"Here a while back I heard a preacher talking on the radio about the peacefulness of the old, and I thought to myself, 'You ignorant man!' I'm ninety-four years old and I have never yet had any peace, to speak of. My mind is just a turmoil of regrets. It's not what I did that I regret, it's what I didn't do. Except for the bottle, I always walked the straight and narrow; a family man, a good provider, never cut up, never did ugly, and I regret it. In the summer of 1902 I came real close to getting in serious trouble with a married woman, but I had a fight with my conscience and my conscience won, and what’s the result? I had two wives, good, Christian women, and I can't hardly remember what either of them looked like, but I can remember the face on that woman so clear it hurts, and there's never a day passes I don’t think about her, and there's never a day passes I don't curse myself. 'What kind of a timid, dried-up, weevily fellow were you?' I say to myself. 'You should've said to hell with what's right and what's wrong, the devil take the hindmost. You'd have something to remember, you'd be happier now.' She's out in Woodlawn, six feet under, and she's been there twenty-two years, God rest her, and here I am, just an old, old man with nothing but a belly and a brain and a dollar or two."

"Mazie became interested in Catholicism in the winter of 1920. A drug addict on Mulberry Street, a prostitute with two small daughters, came to her cage one night and asked for help. The woman said her children were starving. "I knew this babe was a junky," Mazie says, "and I followed her home just to see was she lying about her kids. She had two kids all right, and they were starving in this crummy little room. I tried to get everybody to do something — the cops, the Welfare, the so-called missions on the Bowery that the Methodists run or whatever to hell they are. But all these people said the girl was a junky. That excused them from lifting a hand. So I seen two nuns on the street, and they went up there with me. Between us, we got the woman straightened out. I liked the nuns. They seemed real human. Ever since then I been interested in the Cat'lic Church.""

"All information of a spiritual or personal nature will have to come from our father, who art in Heaven, and I think he's in New York City right now."

"I was sneezing my head off, my eyes were sore, my knees were shaky, I was hungry as a bitch wolf, and I had exactly eight cents to my name. I didn’t care. My history was longer by eleven thousand brand-new words, and at that moment I bet there wasn’t a chairman of the board in all New York as happy as I."

"Life is a mess, but you wouldn't want to miss it."

"It is perhaps an ugly comment on the American press, but the function of the interviewer on most newspapers is to entertain, not to shed light. ... An interviewer soon begins to judge public figures on the basis of their entertainment value, overlooking their true importance. It is not easy to get an interview with Professor Franz Boas, the greatest anthropologist in the world, across a city desk, but a mild interview with Oom the Omnipotent will hit the bottom of page one under a two-column head. ... It is safe to write accurately only about the nuts and the bums. When a public figure does something ridiculous reporters may then write about him accurately."

"He is a night wanderer, and he has put down descriptions of dreadful things he has seen on dark New York streets — descriptions, for example, of the herds of big gray rats that come out in the hours before dawn in some neighborhoods of the lower East Side and Harlem and unconcernedly walk the sidewalks. "I sometimes believe that these rats are not rats at all," he says, "but the damned and aching souls of tenement landlords.""

"When Gould arrives at a party, people who have never seen him before usually take one look, snicker, and edge away. Before the evening is over, however, a few of them almost always develop a kind of puzzled respect for him; they get him in a corner, ask him questions, and try to determine what is wrong with him. Gould enjoys this. "When you came over and kissed my hand," a young woman told him once, "I said to myself, 'What a nice old gentleman.' A minute later I looked around and you were bouncing up and down with your shirt off, imitating a wild Indian. I was shocked. Why do you have to be such an exhibitionist?" "Madam," Gould said, "it is the duty of the bohemian to make a spectacle of himself. If my informality leads you to believe that I'm a rum-dumb, or that I belong in Bellevue, hold fast to that belief, hold fast, hold fast, and show your ignorance.""

"I've made quite a study of fish cooks," Mr. Flood says, "and I’ve decided that old Italians are best. Then comes old colored men, then old mean Yankees, and then old drunk Irishmen. They have to be old; it takes almost a lifetime to learn how to do a thing simply. Even the stove has to be old. If the cook is an awful drunk, so much the better. I don’t think a teetotaler could cook a fish. If he was a mean teetotaler, he might."

"General George Patton once said that he would have given his immortal soul for the medal, and at least two occupants of the White House- Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson- told recipients they would rather have the medal than be president. Incidentally, when the presentation ceremonies are held at the White House, it is customary for the President- the commander in chief of our Armed Forces- to salute the recipient, who then returns the salute. That tradition extends throughout the chain of command: When a recipient is wearing the Medal of Honor, he is generally the one to be saluted first, regardless of how low his rank may be."

"My first contact with a Medal of Honor recipient didn't take place until 1957, long after I'd returned to civilian life and resumed my career in broadcast journalism. By that time, I was doing a weekly interview show on ABC, and one night the object of my scrutiny was a U.S. Army veteran who'd been getting a lot of controversial attention- as well as the Medal of Honor- for his heroic exploits during World War II. His square name was Charles Kelly, but to those familiar with his story, he was mainly known by his colorful nickname- "Commando" Kelly. (In our interview that night, I called him Chuck.) In introducing Kelly to our viewers, I marveled at his various feats of valor, especially at the Battle of Salerno, where, single-handed, he'd killed 40 German soldiers in a span of 20 minutes. But the controversy about Kelly dealt with his failure to flourish in civilian life. During the postwar years he had tried his hand at a number of jobs and business ventures, and nothing had panned out very well. There were reports that his booze problems had ben at the root of his problems, and we talked about that. And as I would later discover, Kelly was not the only Medal of Honor recupient who had the melancholy experience of going from war hero to washout."

"It was in the year 641 that the Arab invaders, in the heyday of their fervor for the faith of which their prophet Mohammed had taught them to consider themselves the heaven-sent bearers, won the battle, (on the field of }}, fifty miles from ancient ), which changed the destinies of , and turned its people, dreaded and victorious for four centuries under their last national kings, the dynasty}}, into a conquered, enslaved, and for a long time ruthlessly oppressed and ill-treated population. III.}}, the last Sassanian king, was murdered on his flight, for plunder, and no effort was made to retrieve the lost fortunes of that terrible day, with which closed an heroic struggle of over eight years; the country’s energies were broken."

"That the nation of , which the biblical table of nations (Gen. x. 22) places second among ’s own children, was of purely Semitic race, has never been doubted. The striking likeness of the n to the type of face would almost alone have sufficed to establish the relationship, even were not the two languages so very nearly akin. But the kinship goes deeper than that, and asserts itself in certain spiritual tendencies, which find their expression in the national religion, or, more correctly, in the one essential modificationintroduced by the Assyrians into the , which they otherwise adopted wholesale, just as they brought it from their Southern home. Like their Hebrew brethren, they arrived at the perception of the Divine Unity; but while the wise men of the Hebrews took their stand uncompromisingly on monotheism and imposed it on their reluctant followers with a fervor and energy that no resistance or backsliding could abate, the Assyrian priests thought to reconcile the truth, which they but imperfectly grasped, with the old traditions and the established religious system. They retained the entire Babylonian pantheon, with all its theory of successive emanations, its two great triads, its five planetary deities, and the host of inferior divinities, but, at the head of them all, and above them all, they placed the one God and Master whom they recognized as supreme. They did not leave him wrapped in uncertainty and lost in misty remoteness, but gave him a very distinct individuality and a personal name: they called him ..."

"The serpent tribe is perhaps more numerous in India than in any other country, and the most poisonous varieties seem to have congregated there. The openness of the dwellings imperatively demanded by the climate, and the vast numbers of people sleeping in the open air, in groves, forests, gardens, etc. give them chances of which they make but too good use, swarming in the gardens and seeking shelter in the houses during the rainy season. As a consequence, death from snake-bite almost equals an epidemic. In ... 1877, 16,777 human victims perished by this means, although £811 reward were paid for the destruction of 127,295 snakes, while in 1882, 19,519 person were reported to have been killed by snakes as compared with 2606 by tigers, leopards, wolves, and all other wild beasts together. That year £1487 were paid in rewards for the destruction of 322,421 venomous reptiles."

"In or about the year before Christ 606, , the great city, was destroyed. For many hundred years had she stood in arrogant splendor, her palaces towering above the Tigris and mirrored in its swift waters; army after army had gone forth from her gates and returned laden with the spoils of conquered countries; her monarchs had ridden to the high place of sacrifice in chariots drawn by captive kings. But her time came at last. The nations assembled and encompassed her around. Popular tradition tells how over two years lasted the siege; how the very river rose and battered her walls; till one day a vast flame rose up to heaven; how the last of a mighty line of kings, too proud to surrender, thus saved himself, his treasures and his capital from the shame of bondage. Never was city to rise again where Nineveh had been."

"Even if the more apocalyptic Germans were right and the German disorder really constituted "a return to primordial instinct, to the mystic chaos of creation out of which the great ecstasies of revolutions and religions arise," that could not alter the fact that the prerequisite of any true creation is freedom."

"Did he believe all that he said? The question is inapplicable to this sort of personality. Subjectively Adolf Hitler was, in my opinion, entirely sincere even in his self-contradictions. For his is a humorless mind that simply excludes the need for consistency that might distress more intellectual types. To an actor the truth is anything that lies in its effect: if it makes the right impression it is true."

"He had a gift for saying unpleasant things in the most charming manner."

"Five groups had ruled pre-war Germany: the twenty-odd sovereigns with the Kaiser at their head, the Army officers, the officials, the aristocratic land-owners and the possessors of heavy industry. Amid a people conditioned to obedience, they alone knew what they wanted and were not afraid to take it. An experimental Republic that did not break the political necks of nearly all five groups was, in time, almost bound once more to fall under their rule. Such is the law of the jungle."

"Ultimately, what matters is where Congress and the president end up, not where they start. But defining the starting point and crafting the baseline are important to the politics and public perceptions of the budget—they are used by one side to magnify the size of the spending cuts or tax changes proposed by the other side—and politics and perceptions have a lot to do with what actually happens."

"Back in 1955, when the federal debt was much smaller, less than 5 percent was held by foreigners. Foreign holdings began to climb in 1970 and surged in the 2000s. Today, foreign governments and private investors hold nearly half of all the U.S. government debt outstanding."

"No one really knows how much the U.S. government can borrow before global investors get uneasy and begin to demand higher interest rates. The national debt exceeded 100 percent of GDP during World War II and then came down as the economy sprinted. But history suggests debt of that level is in the danger zone. Think Argentina, circa 2001. Think Greece, circa 2012."

"In response to years of calls to control “spending” and “smaller government,” Congress and presidents have discovered something simple: giving people a tax break—a credit, a loophole, a deduction—makes them happy without increasing government “spending” and can accomplish the same objective. Practically and economically, there’s no difference between getting $1,000 in cash from the government and getting a $1,000 voucher that you can use to reduce your taxes. Either results in a federal budget deficit that’s $1,000 bigger than it would have been had a tax break not been created. But the first is called “spending” (boos, hisses) and the second is called “a tax cut” (applause, cheers). The first is formally recorded on the budget books as an outflow of money. The second doesn’t show up in the outflow and inflow accounting. It is revenue that wasn’t collected."

"In the high-volume debate over taxes, facts about basic issues—who pays? how much? who doesn’t?—often get lost, twisted, or distorted. Perhaps the most salient and overlooked fact is this one: for most Americans, federal taxes have not risen over the past couple of decades."

"In classical tragedy, this is known as the denouement. In Washington, it could be just farce."

"“Everyone thinks there’s a lot, but there’s nothing that a majority wants to cut. The average person doesn’t want less government. They just want the government to cost less.”"

"The public remains strikingly misinformed about the budget. The typical respondent to a CNN poll said food stamps accounted for 10 percent of federal spending; it’s closer to 2 percent. Maybe being off by a factor of five is understandable given the enormity and complexity of the budget. But it’s harder to make sense of a 2008 Cornell University poll in which 44 percent of those who receive Social Security checks and 40 percent of those covered by Medicare say they “have not used a government social program.”"

"Until the Civil War, the U.S. government relied almost exclusively on tariffs on imported goods, a practice that provoked conflict between Northern manufacturers who favored tariffs to keep imports out and Southern farmers who did not. An income tax was imposed during the Civil War, but proved so unpopular that it died in 1872. In its place, the government imposed taxes on alcohol and tobacco that accounted for 43 percent of all federal revenue by 1900. Repeated attempts to revive the income tax were thwarted when the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in 1895. But the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution changed that. Less than eight months after it was ratified in February 1913, Congress enacted an income tax."

"“Tax reform”—the always popular, always politically treacherous goal of making the tax code simpler and smarter—“is really difficult when you can’t throw money at it. Losers always squeak louder than winners cheer.”"

"The 1980s broke a pattern in which the federal government ran big deficits only in wartime. The deficit topped $200 billion a year from 1983 through 1992. They would have been even bigger if Reagan hadn’t flinched on taxes, accepting significant tax increases in 1982 and 1984."

"The Reagan presidency was styled as a turning point in American politics: the end of the New Deal and the beginning of an era in which the government would retreat from the economy. Ronald Reagan made three significant fiscal promises during his campaign for president: cut taxes, rebuild the nation’s defenses, and balance the budget. He delivered on the first two, but not on the third."

"Reagan enjoyed many victories as president. But starving the beast was not one of them. When he left office, federal spending was 20 percent higher, adjusted for inflation, than it had been when he arrived, and he never found a way to pay for it. In the twenty years before Reagan became president—under Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Carter—the budget deficit averaged well under 1 percent of GDP. In Reagan’s eight years, it averaged 4.25 percent of GDP."

"Adjusted for inflation, the federal government spent more on Medicare and Medicaid in 2011 than it spent on everything in 1960."