Quotes from David Talbot

Even more important maybe, or equally more important at least, is they don't have to scrap for a living.

People sort of take it for granted, but the more you see of the media world the more you appreciate a paper like the Times where its family continues to invest in editorial quality and I think it's the truly is the best paper in the world.

Journalism is not just a cause, it's also a wacky profession.

They may be a little more high brow than we are.

I have enormous respect for Steve Johnson, and as I've told him, Feed was one of the inspirations for Salon. They were up there before we were. And also for Joey and the Suck people.

After Watergate, which happened when I was in college, I became increasingly inspired by journalism as a way to change the world. It sounds corny, but to wake the public up, to serve a higher cause.

I came at age in the '60s, and initially my hopes and dreams were invested in politics and the movements of the time - the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement. I worked on Bobby Kennedy's campaign for president as a teenager in California and the night he was killed.

I have enormous respect for Steve Johnson, and as I've told him, Feed was one of the inspirations for Salon. They were up there before we were. And also for Joey and the Suck people.

Our country's cheerleaders are wedded to the notion of American exceptionalism. But when it comes to the machinations of power, we are all too similar to other societies and ones that have come before us. There is an implacable brutality to power that is familiar throughout the world and throughout history.

If Dulles could use a person, that person was somehow real for him. If not, that person didn't exist.

After a long discussion of the country's woes, the interviewer asked Bobby, "But you are an optimist?" Kennedy nodded and smiled his weary-eyed smile. "Just because you can't live any other way, can you?" he replied.

And this is as good a picture as any of how counterculture communities like the Haight took care of the war's mangled souls: a doctor from a hippie clinic carrying a dying, emaciated soldier in his arms. For decades after the war, up to this very day, right-wing politicians and pundits have spread the libel about how peace activists and hippies greeted returning Vietnam vets with gobs of spit and contempt.

It's vital that you remind everyone around you at the hospital that you're still a human being, even when you feel like a gravely wounded animal. The hospital care providers were not my family, but I soon realized that I needed them to care about me as if we were connected by blood.

Sister Boom Boom—a half-Catholic, half-Jewish drag queen named Jack Fertig, who wore a whore's makeup and a nun's habit and vamped it up with the other political pranksters in the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence—was an especially aggravating thorn in Feinstein's side. Boom Boom ran a remarkably aggressive campaign against Feinstein during her 1983 reelection bid, under the slogan "Nun of the Above," eventually winning twenty-three thousand votes.

Frisco"—a violation of local custom that, as Herb Caen had impatiently explained for many years, was committed only by clueless rubes.

city's anthem, "I Left My Heart in San Francisco," was written in 1954 by two gay lovers who were pining for "the city by the bay" after moving to Brooklyn Heights.

In San Francisco, racism came at you with a smile.

Moscone and Milk were the dynamic duo of San Francisco's progressive revolution. They never forgot what they were elected to do: to fight for the burdened and afflicted, for those whose voices were never heard in the halls of power. They fought for the rights of workers, minorities, gays, and renters. And they made the same enemies: the chamber of commerce, developers, realtors, the SFPD.

When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies, don't you want somebody to love.

I now live in a ghost world, and not everyone who was once close to me wants to venture into this shadowy place to hang out with me. Some people are clearly spooked. I remind them of their own frailty and mortality. I get it; it's understandable. But it confirms my spectral status to me.

I never could stand racism or indifference to poverty. That doesn't make me a lefty ideologue. It makes me an ordinary American.

That little Kennedy... he thought he was a god.

During the Eisenhower administration, the Dulles brothers would finally be given full license to exercise their power in the global arena. In the name of defending the free world from Communist tyranny, they would impose an American reign on the world enforced by nuclear terror and cloak-and-dagger brutality.

What I liked was that the game was not always on the goal line out there. It wasn't always life and death. There were time-out signs. It was a nicer game.