Publishers From The United States

"There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as yours does, they will live at odds with the world. Given a story to enact in which they are the lords of the world, they will act like lords of the world. And, given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now."

"The problem is that man’s conquest of the world has itself devastated the world."

"The Leavers and the Takers are enacting two separate stories, based on entirely different and contradictory premises."

"“As the Takers see it, the gods gave man the same choice they gave Achilles: a brief life of glory or a long, uneventful life in obscurity. And the Takers chose a brief life of glory.” “Yes, that’s certainly how it’s understood. People just shrug and say, ‘Well, this is the price that had to be paid for indoor plumbing and central hearing and air conditioning and automobiles and all the rest.’” I gave him a quizzical look. “And what are you saying?” “I’m saying that the price you’ve paid is not the price of becoming human. It’s not even the price of having the things you just mentioned. It’s the price of enacting a story that casts mankind as the enemy of the world.”"

"People say that I’m sour and misanthropic, and I tell them they’re probably right. Argument of any sort, on any subject, has always seemed like a waste of time to me."

"We don’t need prophets to tell us how to live; we can find out for ourselves by consulting what’s actually there."

"But, alas, a law is catching up to them. They don’t know such a law even exists, but this ignorance affords them no protection from its effects."

"The law we’re looking for here is much like that with respect to civilizations. It’s not about civilizations, but it applies to civilizations in the same way that it applies to flocks of birds and herds of deer. It makes no distinction between human civilizations and beehives. It applies to all species without distinction. This is one reason why the law has remained undiscovered in your culture. According to Taker mythology, man is by definition a biological exception. Out of all the millions of species, only one is an end product."

"Five severed fingers do not make a hand."

"In fact, of course, there is no secret knowledge; no one knows anything that can’t be found on a shelf in the public library."

"The gazelle and the lion are enemies only in the minds of the Takers."

"In order to make their story come true, the Takers have to put an end to creation itself—and they’re doing a damned good job of it."

"Adam wasn’t the progenitor of our race, he was the progenitor of our culture."

"The premise of the Taker story is the world belongs to man.... The premise of the Leaver story is man belongs to the world."

"Mankind was not needed to bring order to the world."

"The world was not made for any one species."

"“Whenever a Taker couple talk about how wonderful it would be to have a big family, they’re reenacting the scene beside the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They’re saying to themselves, ‘Of course it’s our right to apportion life on this planet as we please. Why stop at four kids or six? We can have fifteen if we like. All we have to do is plow under another few hundred acres of rain forest—and who cares if a dozen other species disappear as a result?’”"

"Of course it’s not enough. But if you begin anywhere else, there’s no hope at all."

"You must face the fact that increasing food production doesn’t feed your hungry, it only fuels your population explosion."

"This is precisely how someone speaks who imagines that he is the world’s divinely appointed ruler."

"If the will is there, the method will be found."

"Increasing food production to feed an increased population results in yet another increase in population. Obviously it has to have this result, and to predict any other is simply to indulge in biological and mathematical fantasies."

"“‘Intensification of production to feed an increased population leads to a still greater increase in population.’ Peter Farb said it in Humankind.” “You said it was a paradox?” “No, he said it was a paradox.” “Why?” Ishmael shrugged. “I’m sure he knows that any species in the wild will invariably expand to the extent that its food supply expands. But, as you know, Mother Culture teaches that such laws do not apply to man.”"

"Within your culture as a whole, there is in fact no significant thrust toward global population control. The point to see is that there never will be such a thrust so long as you’re enacting a story that says the gods made the world for man. For as long as you enact that story, Mother Culture will demand increased food production today—and promise population control tomorrow."

"Obviously Mother Culture must be finished off if you’re going to survive, and that’s something the people of your culture can do. She has no existence outside your minds. Once you stop listening to her, she ceases to exist."

"Once you exempt yourself from the law of limited competition, everything in the world except your food and the food of your food becomes an enemy to be exterminated."

"I no longer think of what we’re doing as a blunder. We’re not destroying the world because we’re clumsy. We’re destroying the world because we are, in a very literal and deliberate way, at war with it."

"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."

"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."

"Byrd was born out of his time and into the wrong political party."

"Darden won a handsome primary victory on August 5, 1941 against two antimachine candidates. Although an appendectomy limited his campaigning, he repeated his success in the November election, handily defeating Republican Benjamin Muse, who was running only to preserve the semblance of a two-party system in Virginia."

"Governors of Virginia are appointed by Harry Byrd, subject to confirmation by the electorate... He ruled not with a command but with a nod."

"Talking in whispers, we passed places where the white snow had been gashed deep by shell craters, and at last we came to the front line post-of-command. The officer here greeted us in a tired voice saying we should go no further, as this forest had only yesterday been retaken from the Russians whose lines were a few hundreds yards ahead, and his men had not had time to dig safe trenches. Beyond us was no real front line but only machine gun nests, dugouts and a few shallow trenches, a place where it was not safe for any man to crawl who had not first seen the country by clear light of day. But perhaps we would like to go down into his front line command post dugout, talk to his men and see their Christmas tree."

"Maria Reidelbach: He was impossible and he was impossible in many ways. He ate impossible amounts of food. He was impossibly disheveled. His laughter was impossibly loud and long. At first, I thought it couldn't be genuine, but it was. And Mad, in the middle of the 1950s, when the competition was getting bigger, glossier and more colorful, it was ridiculous to launch a small black and white newsprint magazine that dared-no, it delighted in poking a finger at the American dream. It was suicide not to take advertising. It was impossible. Yet, forty years later, it's hard to name another magazine that's had the impact that Mad's had on American culture. Bill immensely valued Mad's artists and writers, yet he was stubborn about artist's rights; refusing to bend just a bit. He was just impossible. He cared an inordinate amount for an extraordinary number of us. About our health and our love lives, our joys and our sorrows. How could one man have such love in him? It was really impossible."

"Lyle Stuart: At a certain point there were some nuts. One was a psychiatrist, one was an attorney and these nuts felt that comic books were what ruined America. This is before Ronald Reagan, before Nixon. So the Senate committee decided they could get a lot of publicity, a lot of mileage out of investigating comic books. Everybody ran for cover and I, who was then Bill's business manager, suggested that he volunteer to be a witness. And he was the only person who volunteered to be a witness to defend comic books. And we stayed up all night and wrote a speech that is now a historic speech. And he delivered it very well. And when he was through, there was some antagonism on the part of the attorney for the committee because inadvertently we had offended him. These were the days when you were either pro-Franco or anti-Franco depending on how you felt about the Catholic Church and so forth. And Bill ended the speech saying "Let's not make this country another Russia or Spain.""

"Joe Raiola: Bill was an atheist, and I used to talk to him about this because you know it occurred to me that as atheists went Bill was a very religious atheist. I remember one day I went to his office [and] said, "You know, you are a religious atheist. Because you don't believe passionately. You don't believe as much as people who do believe, believe. And you look kind of like a guru, kind of like a perverted or deranged Zen master. I think you're a religious person after all. I don't believe this atheism bit." And he said, "Please, will you please get the hell out of here.""

"Where, in a concept of Cold War culture, does the panic over comic books fit? As Hajdu points out, Communism was never a real issue in the controversy. Since comic books were attacked in the Daily Worker (as weapons of American cultural imperialism), Gaines at one point suggested that criticism of comic books was anti-American, another argument that did not go far with the senators."

"Bill Sarnoff: A couple of incidents kind of show the type of fellow he was and that we knew and loved. The first was back in about 1975, a little earlier than that, when Warner Communications took over the big building in Rockefeller Plaza and a lot of the divisions were moving into the building. And I went over and I asked Bill, I said, "How would you like to move Mad magazine with the rest of the company?" And he said, "Well, if you were a grown child, would you like to live with your parent?""

"Gaines was not a stupid man, but, as Hajdu points out, he was in the position many liberals find them-selves in when they set out to defend the freedom of artistic expression: he claimed that comic books that treated social issues in a progressive spirit were good for children, and that comic books that were filled with pictures of torture and murder had no effect on them. If art can be seriously good for you, though, it follows that it can be seriously bad for you, and that is the point at which censorship enters the picture. The committee was not interested in debating the merits of comics that treated social issues in a progressive spirit; it was interested in the claim that horror and crime comics were merely anodyne entertainment, and they twisted Gaines like a pretzel."

"PM was edited by Ralph Ingersoll, who had made a name for himself at Time magazine, and published by Marshall Field, the Chicago-based department store magnate who went on to found Field Newspaper Enterprises. The newsstand price of PM was a nickel at a time when the N.Y. Daily News sold for 2 cents and the N.Y. Times, 3 cents. It began publishing in 1939 and ceased operating in 1946. "Ingersoll was my hero," Gaines laughs. "I did what he did only I got away with it. Seriously, though, when you consider the kind of material we publish, it makes sense not to accept ads. You can't take money from Pepsi and spoof Coke." It's been for that reason that Gaines has never brought MAD into other forms of the media as some of his rivals — most notably National Lampoon — have done. "First of all it's really a hard thing to do," he explains. "Many people have tried it. Look at Monty Python, who are just incredibly funny. They have never been able to do anything successful in print.""

"Gaines says he misses the old days when he was an active plotter in the editorial side of his operation. With the success of MAD, he was forced out of editorial into the business end of the company. He sold the magazine to Warner Communications in 1960 and has stayed on as publisher. His fondest memories, he says, are the days when he and Al Feldstein were putting out four comics a week. "We had a western love comic called `Western Romances' and we did a column for the lovelorn called `Chat with Chuck,' " he mused. "We were Ann Landers types but unfortunately we didn't give her kind of answers. God knows what stupid things we said. It was a lot of fun in those days, being involved in the creative process. Once MAD came along it was business for me. Business isn't that much fun but I guess you have to have both."

"Joe Raiola: [T]here was one story that really best typified my relationship with Bill. Like I said, we disagreed on everything. I'm skinny, he's fat. He's hairy and I'm bald. And I'm a healthy guy. I'm into nutrition and vitamins and vegetables and bean sprouts. And Bill would eat anything that moved. I mean this is a guy who ordered steak by mail and got cases of frozen beef in his apartment. So one day Bill calls me into his office. He says, "I want you to go downstairs to the corner of 53rd Street and Madison. It's gotta be 53rd and Madison. It's gotta be the southwest corner. There's a hotdog vendor on that corner. I want you to get me two hotdogs with mustard, sauerkraut." I said, "Bill, I can't do that." I said, "Bill, not only can't I do it, but you don't want me to do it." He said, "Why don't I want you to it? I'm hungry." I said, "Because you know I'm a vegetarian. You know it would be against everything I stand for. It would be against my principles. I am a man of integrity, Bill, like you are. To go down and buy you hotdogs and bring them to you... you would have no respect for me. So you don't want me to buy you these hotdogs." And Bill said, "Wrong!" He said, "Not only do I want you to buy me these hotdogs, but Joe, you are the only person in the office I could trust to bring the hotdogs back without eating them.""

"Gaines was a comic-book publisher by accident. The accident involved a motorboat on Lake Placid, and had killed his father, Max, who was the founder of EC Comics. The name stood for Educational Comics, and its proudest product was “Picture Stories from the Bible.” EC Comics also put out “Picture Stories from American History,” “Tiny Tot Comics,” “Animal Fables,” and “Dandy Comics”—nothing that would have attracted the attention of a psychiatrist. William had had no interest in his father’s business. He was studying to become a high-school chemistry teacher when Max died, in 1947, and at first he left the operation of the company he had inherited to others. But he soon became involved, and, along with his editors at EC (renamed Entertaining Comics), Al Feldstein and Harvey Kurtzman, he began producing cleverly drawn, literate, artistically self-conscious, and unapologetic pulp: “The Crypt of Terror” and “The Vault of Horror” (horror comics), “Frontline Combat” and “Two-Fisted Tales” (war comics), “Shock SuspenStories” (topical tales with O. Henry twists, the sort of thing Rod Serling would later do on “The Twilight Zone”), “Weird Science” and “Weird Fantasy” (science fiction). Gaines was a living symbol of the industry as Wertham had described it—and he had volunteered to testify. He sensed the seriousness of the threat that Wertham and the Senate committee posed, and he seems to have genuinely believed in the integrity of his product. But his testimony (partly because the effects of the Dexedrine he had been taking when he was preparing his statement wore off halfway through it) was a catastrophe. Many people, then and after, thought that Gaines destroyed the industry."

"Bill Sarnoff: Warner has-had and has-a unique management philosophy, wherein the executives are rewarded enormously well when they perform enormously well. And I went to Bill and I said, "Gee, uh, Bill, I'd like to work out some sort of profit sharing arrangement with you. Not taking anything away. Whatever you're getting you're getting. But this is just added to it. We'd like to introduce something where you have a possibility, as Mad does better, that you'll be rewarded even more meaningfully." And he said to me, "Bill, I'm really not interested." [small laughs] I said, "Really, Bill, there's no hidden agenda here." [big laughs] "This is only-this can only be good for you. Please believe me, only be good." And he said, "Bill, I'm really not interested." And I said, "Well, okay. You know, if it doesn't make sense to you. But, could you tell me why?" And he said, "Sure. Because that philosophy assumes that I'm not doing everything I can to make Mad as good as it can be. And I tell you that's never been the case, and it never will be the case. So if you think that by giving me a profit incentive I'm gonna work harder, you're absolutely wrong and you've got the wrong guy here." And that's the kind of guy Bill was."

"Bill Gaines was the publisher, and Al Feldstein the editor, of EC Comics, a legendary but short-lived publisher (circa 1950-55) of some of the greatest science-fiction, crime, war, humor and horror comics ever created, that featured artwork by some of the greatest comic-book illustrators to grace the field, and is considered a high-water mark for the medium. The stories that Gaines and Feldstein co-wrote were not the typical comic-book fare of the previous decade. Coming of age in the same postwar era that began to examine the darker underbelly of American society, producing new cinematic genres like film noir, Gaines and Feldstein’s eight-page stories (four to an issue) took a similar darker and more adult turn: EC’s horror comics were more horrible than any before (or since). Their war comics were anti-war comics. Their science-fiction stories had ironic endings that predated The Twilight Zone’s. And their crime and suspense titles featured stories steeped in social and moral issues that had never before been tackled in comics (or most of the larger popular culture) — bigotry, racism and anti-Semitism — which reflected the traditional social and moral aspects of the Judaism of Gaines’ and Feldstein’s upbringing. These were the seeds that would grow into both the underground and overground comics revolutions of the 1960s."

"As Gaines must have realized too late, it was absurd to defend comic-book art by a standard of good taste. Disrespect for good taste was one of the chief attractions comic books had for pre-adolescents. Grossness is a hot commodity in the ten-to-fourteen demographic. Gaines, Feldstein, and Kurtzman were justifiably proud of their ability to reach that market with a superior gross-out product. That’s what Gaines, in his post-amphetamine fog, meant by “good taste.” It’s not what most people mean."

"Gaines says his father, Max, an advertising man, invented the comic book. Gaines senior conceived the idea of producing small, hand-lettered color pictorials for department stores to use as giveaways. "As the family legend goes, he came up with the idea of putting a 10-cents sticker on them and putting them on the newsstand," Gaines said. The comics moved so quickly that he was able to persuade Dell Publishing Company to back him. His first comic book was called "Famous Funnies.""

"It wasn't a patriotic thing," he said, laughing. "I was flunking out of school and I just wanted to get the hell away from home. The only problem was I was a physical wreck and nobody would take me." After being turned down by the Army, Coast Guard and Navy (he didn't even try the Marines), Gaines went back to his draft board and requested to be drafted. It worked. He was the first 20-year-old from his district to go during World War II. He was drafted into the Army Air Corps and trained as a photographer. But after his training at Lowry Field in Denver, he was assigned to a field in Oklahoma City that had no photo facility. He was put on permanent KP duty. He loved it. "Being an eater, this assignment was a real pleasure for me. There were four of us, and we always found all the choice bits the cooks had hidden away. We'd be frying up filet mignon and ham steaks every night. The hours were great, too. I think it was eight hours on and 40 off."

"Gaines may have been the last publisher to computerize, still keeping his circulation figures in hand-penciled ledgers well into the 1980s. Like other publishers, he frequently lashed out at a national decline in reading. Reluctantly, Gaines agreed to produce a videodisc as the magazine’s “commemorative issue” on its 30th anniversary in 1982. “Those people who don’t read, we’ll give ‘em TV,” Gaines groused."

"Mad publisher William M. Gaines, says former editor Nick Meglin, was a “living contradiction. He was singularly the cheapest man in the world, and the most generous.” Gaines, a self-described “maniac” who looked like Santa Claus’ wiseacre younger brother, was a millionaire but dressed like a bum. He shelled out thousands for exotic annual trips for Mad’s staff and freelancers but forced the group to pay for their phone calls. Meglin once asked for a raise of $3 a week and was turned down, only to have Gaines continue the conversation over an expensive dinner at one of New York’s finest restaurants. “The check came, and I said, ‘That’s the whole raise!’” Meglin recalls. “And Bill said, ‘I like good conversation and good food. I don’t enjoy giving raises.’” Gaines, living contradiction that he was, also wasn’t a funny guy. Despite that, he “appreciated humor,” Jaffee said, and helped build one of the most influential magazines in American history."