Probably, I wound up—if not as a jack-of-all-trades—at best as a thirdrate polymath never able to focus these curiosities into a commanding view of life.” The most practical solution appeared to be to make a profession of observation, to become a reporter simply, a profession easily damned as that of a fence-sitter, a moral coward unwilling to take a stand, a chronic water-treader who lacks the strength to take the plunge. To these strictures, I can only reply that once every four years at least I take a stand: I vote. And immediately afterward return to my reporting habits and the continuing discovery that in life the range of irreconcilable points of view, characters, flaws, idiosyncrasies and virtues is astounding, and that in politics there is very often much to be said on both sides, and sometimes on three or four.
One hundred years after the Declaration that 'all men are created equal,' there began to gather in Newport a colony of the rich, determined to show that some Americans were conspicuously more equal than others.
(Las Vegas) composes a night-time image of Babylon in the desert. But it is Everyman's cut-rate Babylon. Not far away there is, or was, a roadside lunch counter and over it a sign proclaiming in three words that a Roman emperor's orgy is now a democratic institution. It says: 'Topless Pizza Lunch.
All Presidents start out pretending to run a crusade but after a couple of years they find they are running something less heroic and much more intractable: namely, the presidency.