A Quote by Chris Matthews
How much he was shaped by being in the hospital so much as a kid. Because he was sick, he was a reader, and because he was a reader, Kennedy had heroes. Because he had heroes, he went into politics. [Kennedy liked Sir Walter Scott, King Arthur's knights, and biographies of political leaders.] If he hadn't been sick, he might have been like everybody else in the family, a jock.
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When I was a kid, Eisenhower had been President forever, and all of a sudden, everything in the world was all about Jack Kennedy. I was 12, interested in politics; my father was from Massachusetts, had an accent like Kennedy.
There were, like, 20 of [Jackie Kennedy's biographies], which was interesting because they are not exactly high literature - they are pulpy.But the [Arthur] Schlesinger transcripts ended up being the most useful of anything.
King Arthur was one of my heroes because he was such a marvelous, heroic, courageous, and magnificent person that I had to admire him even though I knew perfectly well that I could never be in any way like that.
In publishing 'JFK: Reckless Youth' almost twenty years ago, I had gotten into trouble myself with the Kennedys. Not because of my portrait of JFK - which was highly laudatory - but because I had described his parents, Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, in less-than-flattering terms.
I'm not afraid to compete. It's just the opposite. Don't you see that? I'm afraid I will compete — that's what scares me. That's why I quit the Theatre Department. Just because I'm so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else's values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn't make it right. I'm ashamed of it. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I'm sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash.
...if you are not like everybody else, then you are abnormal, if you are abnormal , then you are sick. These three categories, not being like everybody else, not being normal and being sick are in fact very different but have been reduced to the same thing
At 'GQ,' there was never a temptation to pander or preach to the choir because I had no concept of who the reader was or what that reader might want.
At GQ, there was never a temptation to pander or preach to the choir because I had no concept of who the reader was or what that reader might want.
During the whole month that negroes were being beaten by police and washed down the sewer with water hoses, Kennedy and - and King was in jail begging for the federal government to intervene, Kennedy's reply was, "No federal statutes have been violated." And it was only when the negroes erupted that Kennedy come on the television with all his old pretty words.
The uncommon man has done the impossible and there has been that much more light in the world because of it. Children respond to heroes by thinking creatively and sometimes in breaking beyond the bounds of the impossible in their turn, and so becoming heroes themselves.
She always did like tales of adventure-stories full of brightness and darkness. She could tell you the names of all King Arthur's knights, and she knew everything about Beowulf and Grendel, the ancient gods and the not-quite-so-ancient heroes. She liked pirate stories, too, but most of all she loved books that had at least a knight or a dragon or a fairy in them. She was always on the dragon's side by the way.
Teddy Kennedy's big new idea is to wheel out his 18th proposal to raise the minimum wage. He's been doing this since wages were paid in Spanish doubloons (which coincidentally are now mostly found underwater). Kennedy refuses to countenance any risky schemes like trying to grow the economy so people making minimum wage get raises because they've been promoted. Kennedy's going down and he's taking the party with him! (Recognize the pattern?)
I was never much of a reader. I'm a slow reader, which is unusual, because I'm so into language and I love words so much. But it's hard for me to read.
I recalled how much time i had spent fighting for something i didn't even want. maybe because i had been too lazy to think of other avenues to follow. maybe because i had been afraid of what others would think. maybe because it was hard work to be different. perhaps, because a human being is condemned to repeat the steps taken by the previous generation until a certain number of people begin to behave in a different fashion. then the world changes, and we change with it.
The fact is he [John F.Kennedy] always had to have somebody around besides Jackie [Kennedy]. Whatever their relationship, he wanted company. I think it gets back to all those years in a hospital bed.
Kennedy had been assassinated a month or so before. So we walked to the grave of John Kennedy and ended our walking symbolically at the Arlington National Cemetery.
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