Quotes from David Halberstam

Karl Marx, Amaya liked to say, was the last great philosopher of the coal age; his workers were locked into a serflike condition. Had Marx witnessed the industrial explosion of the Oil Century and the rising standard of living it produced among ordinary workers, he might have written differently.

She was young and scared, and hadn't realized there was time to spare.

He seemed touched by a larger spirit, his course guided by something beyond him, so talented, so able, so good-natured that he did not even inspire envy in a city rich with envy.

Most journalists are impatient to get their legwork done and to start the actual writing

She was more sure of her politics than she was of herself.

When one of the children of his friend Harvey Firestone boasted that he had some savings in the bank, Ford lectured the child. That money was idle. What the child should do, Ford said, was spend the money on tools. "Make something," he admonished. "Create something.

If he (George Keenan)felt on occasion more than a little uncomfortable when being listened to, then he was truly unhappy when not being listened to.

Johnson, taking over after Kennedy was murdered and after the Kennedy patched-up advisory commitment had failed, vowed that he was not going to be the President of the United States who lost the Great Society because he lost Saigon. In the end it would take the tragedy of the Vietnam War and the election of Richard Nixon (the only political figure who could probably go to China without being Red-baited by Richard Nixon) to exorcise those demons, and to open the door to China.

Advertising," he wrote, "now compares with such long-standing institutions as the school and the church in the magnitude of its social influence. It dominates the media, it has vast power in the shaping of popular standards and it is really one of the very limited groups of institutions which exercise social control.

I still like boiled potatoes with the skins on," he said, "and I do not want a man standing in back of my chair, laughing up his sleeve at me while I am taking the potatoes' jackets off." Of pleasure and material things he was wary. "I have never known what to do with money after my expenses were paid. I can't squander it on myself without hurting myself," he said, "and nobody wants to do that.

It hung heavily albeit secretly over the internal calculation of Democratic leaders of the period. But of course it was never discussed in the major newspapers and magazine articles that analyzed policy making in Vietnam. It was a secret subject, reflecting secret fears.

Sometimes the best virtue learned on the battlefield is modesty.

Because history became his (Keenan's) genuine passion, he tended to see the world in terms of deep historical forces that, in his mind, formed a nation's character in ways almost beyond the consciousness of the men who momentarily governed it, as if these historical impulses were more a part of them than they knew.

A good team was simply a group of very disparate athletes who assembled each day from radically different lives and—with luck—for one shared moment put aside their differences, their dislikes, their egos and their rivalries, harnessing their energies towards a common goal.

Bobby Kennedy said that when he had been a boy there were three major influences on children – the home, the church, and the school – and now there was a fourth – television.

The Revsons apparently did not like a young psychologist named Joyce Brothers, who appeared as an expert on boxing. Thus the questions given her were exceptionally hard—they even asked her the names of referees—in the desire to get her off the show; their strategy had no effect: She became the second person to win $64,000.)

Mr. Ford, here is our new plant," Lord Perry, who was the head of Ford in Europe, said proudly. "Where is the water?" the old man asked. "There isn't any water," Lord Perry replied. "Well, let's get out of here," Ford said. "I don't even want to look at it." That had ended the ceremony. Ford had driven off, and they had torn down the plant and moved it to a deep-water site.

The problem with military policies that are built to domestic specifications and do not take into account the complexity of the real world is that eventually the real world intrudes.

He never, even in the most casual conversation with friends, spoke a sentence which did not sound as if it was ready for the air.

He understood that the key to success, the secret to it, was the mastery of the grunt work, all the little details.

The crisis of liberalism (and of American political reflection) is due to liberalism's success in becoming the official language for all public statement.

Mohr was one of the most talented people on the staff of Time, in print as well as in person—the two are often different.

Oppenheimer had, in his own mind at least, exaggerated his role in the making of the atomic bomb and, correspondingly, exaggerated his guilt, seeing himself as, in the Bhagavad-Gita, Death the destroyer of worlds. Von Neumann agreed. "Some people profess guilt to claim credit for the sin," von Neumann liked to tell Ulam.

Williams had a very shrewd sense of how much heat the organism could take at any given time;