It isn’t money itself that causes the trouble, but the use of money as votive offering and pagan ornament.
Most American cities shop to their best advantage when seen from a height or from a distance, at a point where the ugliness of the buildings dissolves into the beauty of an abstraction.
The future is an empty canvas or a blank sheet of paper, and if you have the courage of your own thought and your own observation you can make of it what you will.
What kind of people do we wish to become, and how do we know an American when we see one? Is it possible to pursue a common purpose without a common history or a standard text?
Youth as glimpsed by its elders is a story that comes from afar, showing itself as either lovely to look at or a torment to endure.
I know no other way out of what is both the maze of the eternal present and the prison of the self except with a string of words.
In the garden of tabloid delight, there is always a clean towel and another song.
Wars might come and go, but the seven o’clock news lives forever.
If we could let go of our faith in money, who knows what we might put in its place?
Love of country follows from the exercise of its freedoms, not from pride in its fleets or its armies.
The gentlemen who wrote the Constitution were as suspicious of efficient government as they were wary of democracy, a “turbulence and a folly” that was associated with the unruly ignorance of an urban mob.
Power broken into a thousand pieces can be hidden and disowned. If no individual or institution possesses the authority to act without of everybody else in the room, then nobody is at fault if anything goes wrong.
But the line of thought that I’d been chasing for several days was implicit in the ruins of the old Roman Empire, which gradually destroyed itself by substituting the faith in a legion of miraculous words for the strength of armies and the weight of walls.
Label celebrity a consumer society’s most precious consumer product, and eventually it becomes the hero with a thousand faces, the packaging of the society’s art and politics, the framework of its commerce, and the stuff of its religion.
Democracy is born in dirt, nourished by the digging up and turning over as much of it as can be brought within reach of a television camera or subpoena.
History is not what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago; it’s a story about what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago.
If in the well and truly made martini DeVoto finds “water of life” and the blessing to the spirit, so also DeVoto’s The Hour brings to its readers the breath of life and a vision of themselves made generous, indomitable and wise.
Now that Mr. Carter has made a book of his diary, an adoring memoir entitled Keeping Faith, the notes read like a collection of letters sent from scout camp.
The American oligarchy increasingly has less in common with the American people than it does with the equivalent oligarchies in Germany or Mexico or Japan.
If you wear a suit, you can talk to anybody.