Famous quotes containing the words text, society and/or presidents:
“Great speeches have always had great soundbites. The problem now is that the young technicians who put together speeches are paying attention only to the soundbite, not to the text as a whole, not realizing that all great soundbites happen by accident, which is to say, all great soundbites are yielded up inevitably, as part of the natural expression of the text. They are part of the tapestry, they aren’t a little flower somebody sewed on.”
—Peggy Noonan (b. 1950)
“Connie, all my life I kept trying to go up in society where everything was legal, straight.... But the higher I go the crookeder it becomes. Where the hell does it end?”
—Mario Puzo, U.S. author, screenwriter, and Francis Ford Coppola, U.S. director, screenwriter. Michael Corleone (Al Pacino)
“Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the constant omission of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)