“--nor had I understood til then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Plot Against America
“Anything can happen to anyone, but it usually doesn't. Except when it does.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Plot Against America
“And as Lindbergh's election couldn't have made clearer to me, the unfolding of the unforeseen was everything. Turned wrong way round, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as "History," harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Plot Against America
“It's so heartbreaking, violence, when it's in a house-like seeing the clothes in a tree after an explosion. You may be prepared to see death but not the clothes in the tree.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Plot Against America
“There were two types of strong men: those like Uncle Monty and Abe Steinheim, remorseless about their making money, and those like my father, ruthlessly obedient to their idea of fair play.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Plot Against America
“And how long will the American people stand for this treachery perpetrated by their elected president? How long will Americans remain asleep while their cherished Constitution is torn to shreds”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Plot Against America
“To have enslaved America with this hocuspocus! To have captured the mind of the world's greatest nation without uttering a single word of truth! Oh, the pleasure we must be affording the most malevolent man on earth!
Philip Roth (2004-09-06T16:00:00+00:00). The plot against America (Kindle Locations 4887-4888). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Plot Against America
“War with Canada was far less of an enigma to me than what Aunt Evelyn was going to use for a toilet during the night”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Plot Against America
“But how will I get out?" And all at once the door was open--and there was Seldon and behind him his mother. "How'd you do that?" I said. "I opened the door," he said. "But how?" He shrugged. "I pushed. I just pushed. It was open all the time." And that was when I began to bawl and Mrs. Wishnow took me in her arms and said, "That's okay. Things like this happen. They can happen to anyone.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Plot Against America
“I was still too much of a fledgling with people to understand that, in the long run, nobody is a picnic and that I was no picnic myself.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Plot Against America
“The pompous son of a bitch knows everythingit's too bad he doesn't know anything else.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Plot Against America
“...I realized that my father, of all these men, was the most obstinate, helplessly bonded to his better instincts and their excessive demands. I only then understood that he had quit his job not merely because he was fearful of what awaited us down the line should we agree like the others to be relocated, but because, for better or worse, when he was bullied by superior forces that he deemed corrupt it was his nature not to yield--in this instance, to resist either running away to Canada, as my mother urged our doing, or bowing to a government directive that was patently unjust. There were two types of strong men: those like Uncle Monty And Abe Steinheim, remorseless about their making money, and those like my father, ruthlessly obedient to their idea of fair play.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Plot Against America
“He'd tell us that in a democracy, keeping abreast of current events was a citizen's most important duty and that you could never start too early to be informed about the news of the day.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Plot Against America
“You had to be there to see what it looked like. They live in a dream, and we live in a nightmare.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Plot Against America
“Others? He dares to call us others? He’s the other. The one who looks most American—and he’s the one who is least American! The man is unfit. He shouldn’t be there. He shouldn’t be there, and it’s as simple as that!”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Plot Against America
“But why did you go,” my mother asked him, “when it was bound to upset you like this?” “I went,” he told her, “because every day I ask myself the same question: How can this be happening in America? How can people like these be in charge of our country? If I didn’t see it with my own eyes, I’d think I was having a hallucination.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Plot Against America
“Son, anything can happen to anyone," my father told me, "but it usually doesn't.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Plot Against America
“How can people like these be in charge of our country? If I didn’t see it with my own eyes, I’d think I was having a hallucination.” Though”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Plot Against America
“And how long will the American people stand for this treachery perpetrated by their elected president? How long will Americans remain asleep while their cherished Constitution is torn to shreds?”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Plot Against America
“Ordinarily my mother drew no strength from scorn,”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Plot Against America
“Never in my life had I so harshly judged any adult—not my parents, not even Alvin or Uncle Monty—nor had I understood till then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others. “Did you meet Mr. von Ribbentrop?” Now almost girlishly bashful, she replied, “I danced with Mr. von Ribbentrop.” “Where?”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Plot Against America
“the quiet, conscientious boy whose satisfactions emanated not from his being a precocious big shot full of contrary opinions but from that strong, even current of an interior life that carried him steadily along from morning to night and that, in my eyes, had always made him genuinely superior to the other kids his age.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Plot Against America
“They recruited the most supple and athletic of the cops to train as mounted policemen, and a small kid could be mesmerized just watching one who’d been lazing majestically down the street stop to write a parking ticket and then lean way over in the saddle so as to place the ticket under the car’s windshield wiper, a physical gesture, if ever there was one, of magnificent condescension to the machine age.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Plot Against America
“she concludes, “I will not yield to or be intimidated by the illegal representatives of a seditious administration, and I ask no more of the American people than that they follow my example and refuse to accept or support government conduct that is indefensible. The history of the present administration is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations,”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Plot Against America
“Before that night, I’d had no idea my father was so well suited for wreaking havoc or equipped to make that lightning-quick transformation from sanity to lunacy that is indispensable in enacting the unbridled urge to destroy.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Plot Against America
“Remorse, predictably, was the form taken by her distress, the merciless whipping that is self-condemnation, as if in times as bizarre as these there were a right way and a wrong way that would have been clear to somebody else, as if in confronting such predicaments the hand of stupidity is ever far from guiding anyone.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Plot Against America
“SEPTEMBER–DECEMBER 1941. Delivers his “Who Are the War Agitators?” radio speech to an America First rally in Des Moines on September 11; audience of eight thousand cheers when he names “the Jewish race” as among those most powerful and effective in pushing the U.S.—“for reasons which are not American”—toward involvement in the war.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Plot Against America
“They were ordered to end their expatriation and return to America, where Colonel Lindbergh was to take up the cause of America First. Speeches were provided, written in English, denouncing the British, Roosevelt, and the Jews and supporting America’s neutrality in the European war;”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Plot Against America
“I am not impressed by the White House!” my father cried, hammering on the table to shut her up after she’d said “the White House” for the fifteenth time. “I am only impressed by who lives there. And the person who lives there is a Nazi.”
― Philip Roth, quote from The Plot Against America
Philip Roth
Born place: in Newark, New Jersey, The United States
Born date March 19, 1933
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