Quotes from Charlie LeDuff

In Detroit, it's so fucking poor that fire is cheaper than a movie. A can of gas is $3.50 and movie is 8 bucks. But there aren't any movie theaters left in Detroit so fuck it. They burn the empty house next door and they sit on the fucking porch with a 40, and they're barbecuing and laughing because it's fucking entertainment.

He understood that everybody's somebody to someone. He

People in uniform will tell you that no one life is more important than another. The lives of a white cop, a black fireman, a minister and a drug addict all have equal value. But the presumption is that if a person in uniform is killed with impunity, if such a killer is allowed to run free, then no regular citizen is safe. So for the sake of civil order, when a person in uniform is murdered, heads must get knocked, doors must be kicked in and every available cop is put to the task.

We are born to a time. What you do with it is on you. Do the best you can. Try to be good. And live.

Somehow, the city of promise had become a scrap yard of dreams. But fighters do what they do best when they've

The timing of Moroun's hat giveaway stunt was as unfortunate as the selection of hats themselves. They were not your run-of-the-mill knitwear; they were, in fact, ski masks. The type gunmen use to stick up liquor stores.

In Detroit, we all talked the race game. It is a way of life.

But these things are not supposed to be news. These things are supposed to be normal. And when normal things become the news, the abnormal becomes the norm. And when that happens, you might as well put a fork in it. What galleries and museums have to do

What galleries and museums have to do with a dead man is beyond me. Writing about shit like that in the city we were living in seemed equal to writing about the surf conditions while reporting in the Gaza Strip.

Grandpa is on layaway while his family tries to scratch together a box and a plot.

As for Congress, one imaginative polling firm found that brussels sprouts, head lice, cockroaches, colonoscopies, and gonorrhea were more popular than our elected representatives. Apparently, the American people realized that when you take it up the ass from a proctologist, at least it's for your own well-being. From Congress, not so much

TV news is quite probably the most superficial form of journalism ever invented. Hunter Thompson characterized it fifty years ago as a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men go to die.

If we were poets, we'd starve on words.

We will not admit it in the course of our Emmy acceptance speeches, but we reporters know that our work has a corrosive effect, amplifying anxiety in the suburban kitchen. It reinforces stereotypes of a violent black city, which may have its truths, but the extent of the violence is blown wildly out of proportion.