2005
Context: I think the government should be spying on all Arabs, engaging in torture as a televised spectator sport, dropping daisy cutters wantonly throughout the Middle East and sending liberals to Guantanamo.
But if we must engage in a national debate on half-measures: After 9-11, any president who was not spying on people calling phone numbers associated with terrorists should be impeached for being an inept commander in chief.
With a huge gaping hole in lower Manhattan, I'm not sure why we have to keep reminding people, but we are at war. (Perhaps it's because of the media blackout on images of the 9-11 attack. We're not allowed to see those because seeing planes plowing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon might make us feel angry and jingoistic.)
Among the things that war entails are: killing people (sometimes innocent), destroying buildings (sometimes innocent) and spying on people (sometimes innocent).
That is why war is a bad thing. But once a war starts, it is going to be finished one way or another, and I have a preference for it coming out one way rather than the other.
“I am an American, Chicago born — Chicago, that somber city — and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.”
Source: The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Ch. 1 (opening line)
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Saul Bellow 103
Canadian-born American writer 1915–2005Related quotes
As quoted in Rutherford B. Hayes, and His America (1954) by Harry Barnard. p. 481
On her relationship to the city of Chicago in “Aprils Fools and Their Universe: Kristiana Rae Colón and #LetUsBreathe Collective” http://sixtyinchesfromcenter.org/aprils-fools-and-their-universe-kristiana-rae-colon-and-letusbreathe-collective/ in Sixty (2018 Oct 30)
“Chicago is not the most corrupt American city, it's the most theatrically corrupt.”
The Dick Cavett Show (9 June 1978)
The Education of Henry Adams (1907)
The Climb, her character's guitar piece for Hannah Montana: The Movie and dedicated to her father Billy Ray Cyrus
Song lyrics