“Any satirist writing a futuristic novel who had imagined a President Reagan during the Eisenhower years would have been accused of perpetrating a piece of crude, contemptible, adolescent, anti-American wickedness, when, in fact, he would have succeeded, as prophetic sentry, where Orwell failed.”

— Philip Roth

Paris Review Interview (1986)

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Philip Roth 95

American novelist 1933–2018

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“It was the college conservatives who had almost succeeded in electing John Smith to the Presidency of the United States during the last election. The fact that Smith had been dead for twenty years had not dampened their ardor; quite the contrary, many considered this the candidate’s best quality.”

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Source: Journey Beyond Tomorrow (1962), Chapter 8 “How Joenes Taught, and What He Learned” (pp. 70-71)

“There was such a dense concentration of energy there [Vietnam], American and essentially adolescent, if that energy could have been channeled into anything more than noise, waste and pain it would have lighted up Indochina for a thousand years.”

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“There used to be a time when this country's president could have delivered the same New Year's Address he had given a year before, and nobody would have noticed.
Fortunately, that time has passed.”

Václav Havel (1936–2011) playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and 1st President of the Czech Republic

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“Ironically, the North Vietnamese victory could have come much sooner. In view of the increasing commitment of American troops in the mid- and late 1960s, General Giap would have been well advised to abandon the big-unit war, pull in his horns to take away the visible threat to South Vietnam's survival, and thereby delude the Americans that they had already achieved their goal of making the South Vietnamese self-sufficient. President Johnson had given Giap that chance at the Manila conference of 1966 when he had announced that once "the level of violence subsides," American and other foreign troops would withdraw within six months. That would have been eight years before the eventual South Vietnamese defeat, long before the South Vietnamese armed forces would have had any claim to self-sufficiency. Making that offer at the Manila conference may well have been an effort by President Johnson to rid himself of the albatross of South Vietnam, whatever the long-range consequences. For once the United States had pulled out under those circumstances and Giap had come back, what American President would have dared risk the political pitfalls involved in putting American troops back in?”

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Source: A Soldier Reports (1976), p. 406.

“By almost universal agreement, the most vague and ineffectual of all [Presidents] was Millard Fillmore, who succeeded to the office in 1850 upon the death of Zachary Taylor, and spent the next three years demonstrating how the country would have been run if they had just propped Taylor up in a chair with cushions.”

Bill Bryson (1951) American author

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“The Obama years have been weighed in the balance and found wanting. Severely wanting. By the end of Obama's presidency, the U. S. standing in the world was weaker—clearly and appreciably weaker—than when he became president. The force of American power was diminished, and freedom was in retreat. By the end of Obama's presidency, was there a single part of the world where the United States was in a stronger position than when he took office? Was there an ally who was more confident or an adversary who was less so? By the end of Obama's presidency, were any important countries either friendlier or freer than they had been when he took over? The answer to all these questions: no.”

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“If Lennon were alive today, he probably would have reconciled with the man he accused of having "made a fool of everyone." John would have been the first one now, if he had been there, to recognise and acknowledge what Maharishi has done for the world and appreciate it”

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Quoted from: Yoko Ono - Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Guru to Beatles and Beach Boys died in The Netherlands, RollingStone magazine, 6 Mars 2008. 1047, 16, n°1047 http://www.bienfaits-meditation.com/en/the_beatles_and_tm/john_lennon/john_and_yoko_2008
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“The Holocaust would have been unimaginable without the Nazi Party; the Nazi Party would have been unimaginable without Hitler; and Hitler’s rise to power would have been unimaginable without the unique circumstances that brought the Weimar Republic to ruin. To hear Goldhagen tell it, mass murder was all set to go: a century-long build-up of eliminationist anti-Semitism simply had to express itself. But the moment when a historian says that something had to happen is the moment when he stops writing history and starts predicting the past.”

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“If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.”

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Quotes 1990s, 1990-1994

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Philip Roth 95

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