A Quote by Richard Ben Cramer

DiMaggio was never a rube. He was very smart and very urban. Coming out of the Great Depression, he was the immigrant boy who made it big. Coming back from World War II, he had all the wealth and power that New York aspired to. When New York saw itself as the center of the world, he was its paragon of class.
When I saw the pictures of New York without the World Trade Center, New York looked like a shadow of itself.
Chicago seems to follow New York, and coming from New York and being in real estate, I worry about things happening in Chicago that have happened in New York. I've seen a great city like New York go downhill. It has a wonderful financial downtown, but the rest of the city is not very nice.
Coming out of college, back to New York, where I didn't really know that many people, I thought our world was very atomized.
If it is bin Laden, he's a very intelligent guy. He's been planning his war for a long time. I remember the last time I met him in 1997 in Afghanistan. And bin Laden said to me "From this mountain, Mr. Robert, upon which you are sitting, we beat the Russian army and helped break the Soviet Union. And I pray to God that he allows us to turn America into a shadow of itself." When I saw the pictures of New York without the World Trade Center, New York looked like a shadow of itself.
It had always been a dream of mine to come to New York to work. Coming to New York and looking for work is one thing, but coming to New York and already having a job and feeling like you are already part of the city has been an amazing experience for me.
I spent a whole year in New York without going back to France. And I always came back because my mother was living in New York since I was 13. So I went to summer camps, hang out at the Roxy, go to class for ballet, so I always had part of my life in New York.
I just love New York. New York has energy, it has culture, New York is very diverse. There's not a better place in the world.
I went to Europe in '52 or '53, and when I came back, I stopped in New York. I remember looking out of a window on a glorious October morning and there was New York. And I thought, 'I'm coming here. This is for me.'
I have friends in New York that won't leave New York, and they're really talented people, but they'd rather take an acting class in New York than do a play in Florida or Boston. That's just weird to me, but they get into that I've-got-to-be-in-the-center-of-the-universe mentality. I'm not that way.
Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective - a New World Order - can emerge. . . Now, we can see a New World Order coming into view. A world in which there is a very real prospect for a New World Order. . .A world where the United Nations, freed from a Cold War stalemate, is poised to fulfill the historic vision of its founders.
My parents were very humanistic, but where we lived was not the cultural center of the world. Hardly. So I came to New York for two reasons: to find my own kin and also to get a job. And that's what I came to New York for in '67.
I always thought it's not that the greatest players in the world come from New York. It's just the guys who shouldn't have made it, they came from New York. That's what makes New York special.
After World War II the Republicans - the Wall Street crowd - were very worried about a depression coming back. They hated Franklin Roosevelt in that crowd, my father among them. And there was a great fear in '46 that we'd fall back into the pits. And they always wanted to break up the Roosevelt legislation.
It's very important to understand that World War II is at the base of this new policy. From the 1890s on, the U.S. was always imperialistic. We went after the Philippines, and we did the same in Cuba, in Hawaii. We controlled South America. Woodrow Wilson was not what he was supposed to be. He was very much a white man first. "The world must be made safe for democracy." It really accelerates after World War II.
It is a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence, and yet I cannot help but feel it has about it something of the dawning of the universe. Perhaps because the entire world continues to dream of New York, even as New York dominates and exploits it.
I really love New York, and I've lived here for a long time. I know not just the different neighborhoods but the different kind of class cultures in New York from the up-and-coming, down-and-out kind of artist to the powerful worlds of finance.
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