Quotes from Ronald Steel

Discount air fares, a car in every parking space and the interstate highway system have made every place accessible - and every place alike.

Even though a part of Lippmann was tempted to retreat from the world, to build "walls against chaos," he fought that temptation. He challenged himself, grappled with his demons, and deliberately pursued a career that forced him into the political thick of battle, did not allow him to withdraw from a fight, and exposed him every day to his enemies. That took a special kind of courage for a man who shunned personal contention.

he spoke of what he called the "inner history of weakness, of what disappoints us in leaders, the timidity of thought, the hesitancy and the drift." In these cases imagination and will are often blinded by "constructed evils," he wrote. "We falter from childhood amidst shames and fears, we move in closed spaces where stale tradition enervates, we grow hysterical over success and failure, and so by surrounding instinct with terror, we prepare the soul for weakness.

Children, for whom suburban life was supposed to make wholesome little Johns and Wendys, became the acid-dropping, classroom-burning hippies of the 1960s.