Home The Mine of Useless Information - everything you never needed to know!

Theodore H. White Quotes

Showing page 1 of 2

1 2 Next »


"If you make a living, if you earn your own money, you're free - however free one can be on this planet."
Business

"I class myself as a manual laborer."

"I happen to think that American politics is one of the noblest arts of mankind; and I cannot do anything else but write about it."

"The gusto of one, the indignation of the other; the challenge of the one party, the response of the other; the eloquence and the comedy, the passion and the issues were ours-no other country can provide them."

"He is like a good prewar house-solidly built. They don't build them that way anymore. He's also been repainted several times."

"His passion has aroused the best and the beast in man. And the beast waited for him in the kitchen."

"The best time to listen to a politician is when he's on a stump on a street corner in the rain late at night when he's exhausted. Then he doesn't lie."

"There is no excitement anywhere in the world, short of war, to match the excitement of an American presidential campaign."

"A liberal is a person who believes that water can be made to run uphill. A conservative is someone who believes everybody should pay for his water. I'm somewhere in between: I believe water should be free, but that water flows downhill."

"With the end of the nominating process, American politics leaves logic behind."

"Politics in America is the binding secular religion."

"Generally students are the best vehicles for passing on ideas, for their thoughts are plastic and can be molded and they can adjust the ideas of old men to the shape of reality as they find it in villages and hills of China or in ghettos and suburbs of America."

"I saw Chungking for the first time more than 40 years ago - a city of hills and mists, of grays and lavenders, two rivers shaping it to a point and the cliff rising above me like a challenge."
History

"I, alas, must present myself somewhat ignominiously as a chef in a busy kitchen. Somewhere a novel is bubbling on a back burner, an old attempt at history may come out of the freezer."

"It was like walking through a field playing a brass tuba the day it rained gold. Everything was sitting around waiting to be reported."

"When that book came out, it was like Columbus telling about America at the court of Ferdinand and Isabella."

"For those men who, sooner or later, are lucky enough to break away from the pack, the most intoxicating moment comes when they cease being bodies in other men's command and find that they control their own time, when they learn their own voice and authority."

"I'd get into a room and disappear into the woodwork. Now the rooms are so crowded with reporters getting behind-the-scenes stories that nobody can get behind-the-scenes stories."

"Those 40 or 50 national correspondents who had followed Kennedy since the beginning of his electoral exertions into the November days had become more than a press corps-they had become his friends and, some of them, his most devoted admirers."

"When the bus or the plane rolled or flew through the night, they sang songs of their own composition about Mr Nixon and the Republicans in chorus with the Kennedy staff and felt that they, too, were marching like soldiers of the Lord to the New Frontier."

© 2006 The Mine of Useless Information