Quotes from Ron Powers

Sam had laced nearly everything in the paper with his screwball wit—proposing in one news item that a newly enacted whiskey tax made it a patriotic duty to drink.)

To begin consciously searching into the world of mental illness is to see it snap into focus before your eyes. It is everywhere. It has been hiding in plain sight, awaiting notice. Its camouflage is little more than the human instinct to reject engagement with the pitiable, the fearsome, the unspeakable—and to close our eyes to the moral obligations that those states of being demand of us.

The Senate is now composed of a different material from what it once was. Its glory hath departed. Its halls no longer echo the words of a Clay, or Webster, or Calhoun . . . the void is felt.

Thomas Insel, the former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, has estimated that mental illness costs taxpayers $444 billion a year. Two-thirds of that total is eaten up by disability payments and lost productivity. Only a third is spent on medical care. "The way we pay for mental health today is the most expensive way possible," Insel has said. "We don't provide support early, so we end up paying for lifelong support.

Taxpayers and legislators alike seem generally ignorant of the extent to which they are being soaked by the hidden costs of this parsimony. For instance, public care costs far less than public jails. The National Alliance on Mental Illness has estimated that for every $ 2,000 to $ 3,000 per year spent on treating the mentally ill, $ 50,000 is saved on incarceration costs.

The mentally ill people in our lives, as they strive to build healthy, well-supported, and rewarding lives for themselves, can show us all how to reconnect with the most primal of human urges, the urge to be of use, disentangling from social striving, consumer obsession, cynicism, boredom, and isolation, and honoring it among the true sources of human happiness.

am quite sure that (bar one)II I have no race prejudices, and I think I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. All that I care to know is that a man is a human being—that is enough for me; he can't be any worse.

He understood shock value: he frequently promised to demonstrate what he meant by "cannibalism" by eating a baby onstage, if someone would hand him one. No one ever did.

At the ten-minute halftime, "with the figures standing 11 for Yale and 5 for Princeton, Mr. Clemens was one of the most eager of the mathematicians figuring how Princeton might yet pull the game out of the fire." Princeton didn't, but the reporter recorded the author's color commentary on the first pigskin game he'd ever seen. "I should think they'd break every bone they ever had!

Well, say, this beats croquet. There's more go about it!

am an anti-imperialist," Mark Twain told the reporters at dockside. "I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land."12

I am an anti-imperialist," Mark Twain told the reporters at dockside. "I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.

Here was a demonstration of what Howells maintained—at just about this time—was his most liberating literary strength, his "single-minded use of words, which he employs as Grant did to express the plain, straight meaning their common acceptance has given them . . . He writes English as if it were a primitive and not a derivative language, without Gothic or Latin or Greek behind it."13

But now—why, we have got into a mess, a quagmire from which each fresh step renders the difficulty of extrication immensely greater.

The beautiful and "talented" proceeded from classic Anglo-Saxon stock, tribes of blond, blue-eyed Angles and Saxons and Jutes who immigrated to the British Isles from northern Europe in the fifth century in search of open farmland and whose descendants now went to the same churches, universities, and clubs that Galton frequented. The others, those inconvenient wogs, amounted to a deadly snake coiled in the garden of his Eden.

Sometimes my feelings are so hot that I have to take to the pen and pour them out on paper to keep them from setting me afire inside: then all that ink and labor are wasted, because I can't print the result.

He would rather decline 2 drinks than one German verb."18

But as long as American civilisation lasts New York will last."99

Truman seethed. "I put it to you," he railed during a campaign stop in Indianapolis during his famous come-from-behind reelection campaign in 1948. "Is it un-American to visit the sick, aid the afflicted or comfort the dying? I thought that was simple Christianity!

Too many of the mentally ill in our country live under conditions of atrocity. Storytelling

The "captain" says that when I came to engage passage in the Quaker City I "seemed to be full of whiskey, or something," and filled his office with the "fumes of bad whiskey" . . . [F]or a ceaseless, tireless, forty-year public advocate of total abstinence the "captain" is a mighty good judge of whiskey at second-hand.28