Quotes from The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

“Of all the countries in the world, we Americans have been the greatest destroyers of land of any race of people barbaric or civilized," Bennett said in a speech at the start of the dust storms. What was happening, he said, was "sinister", a symptom of "our stupendous ignorance.”
― Timothy Egan, quote from The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

“Much of Texas took its prohibition seriously. Not Dalhart. It took its whiskey seriously, in part because some of the finest corn liquor in America was coming out of the High Plains.”
― Timothy Egan, quote from The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

“So cotton growers, siphoning from the Ogallala, get three billion dollars a year in taxpayer money for fiber that is shipped to China, where it is used to make cheap clothing sold back to American chain retail stores like Wal-Mart.”
― Timothy Egan, quote from The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

“Rioting over food: how could this be? Here was all this grain, food enough to feed half the world, sitting in piles at the train station, going to waste. Something was out of balance.”
― Timothy Egan, quote from The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

“At the wedding, women served a dish of cabbage that had been shredded by wooden kraut cutters, mixed with ground pork and onion, wrapped in bread dough, and baked.”
― Timothy Egan, quote from The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

“Of all the countries in the world, we Americans have been the greatest destroyers of land of any race of people barbaric or civilized,” Bennett said in a speech at the start of the dust storms. What was happening, he said, was “sinister,” a symptom of “our stupendous ignorance.”
― Timothy Egan, quote from The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

“Of all the countries in the world, we Americans have been the greatest destroyers of land of any race of people barbaric or civilized,”
― Timothy Egan, quote from The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

“The villainous sun and the starved bank did not seem related—yet.”
― Timothy Egan, quote from The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

“The name Oklahoma is a combination of two Choctaw words— okla, which means "people,”
― Timothy Egan, quote from The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

“Going to the outhouse was an ordeal, a wade through shoulder-high drifts, forced to dig to make forward progress.”
― Timothy Egan, quote from The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

“Of all the countries in the world, we Americans have been the greatest destroyers of land of any race of people barbaric or civilized," Bennett said in a speech at the start of the dust storms. What was happening, he said, was "sinister," a symptom of "our stupendous ignorance.”
― Timothy Egan, quote from The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

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Popular quotes

“... it is the purpose of this history to trace not the mere outlines of a life but the inner plan, not the external markings but the secret soul.”
― Steven Millhauser, quote from Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright

“child of Amber may walk among them, and such was my heritage. You may call them parallel worlds if you wish, alternate universes if you would, the products of a deranged mind if you care to. I call them shadows, as do all who possess the power to walk among them. We select a possibility and we walk until we reach it. So, in a sense, we create it.”
― Roger Zelazny, quote from The Guns of Avalon

“As I noted in Chapter 14, “The Earthquake,” there was a supermarket in Jerusalem where I shopped for fruits and vegetables almost every day. It was owned by an Iraqi Jewish family who had immigrated to Israel from Baghdad in the early 1940s. The patriarch of the family, Sasson, was an elderly curmudgeon in his sixties. Sasson’s whole life had left him with the conviction that the Arabs would never willingly accept a Jewish state in their midst and that any concessions to the Palestinians would eventually be used to liquidate the Jewish state. Whenever Sasson heard Israeli doves saying that the Palestinians really wanted to live in peace with the Jews, but that they just couldn’t always come out and declare it, it sounded ludicrous to him. It simply ran counter to everything life in Iraq and Jerusalem had taught him, and neither the Camp David treaty with Egypt nor declarations by Yasir Arafat—nor the Palestinian uprising itself—had convinced him otherwise. As I said, as far as Sasson was concerned, the problem between himself and the Palestinians was not that they didn’t understand each other, but that they did—all too well. Sasson, I should add, did not appear to be ideologically committed to Israel’s holding the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He was a grocer, and ideology did not trip easily off his tongue. I am sure he rarely, if ever, went to the occupied territories. Like a majority of Israelis, he viewed the Israeli presence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip primarily in terms of security. I believe that Sasson is the key to a Palestinian–Israeli peace settlement—not him personally, but his world view. He is the Israeli silent majority. He is the Israeli two-thirds. You don’t hear much from the Sassons of Israel. They don’t talk much. They are not as interesting to interview as wild-eyed messianic West Bank settlers, or as articulate as Peace Now professors who speak with an American accent. But they are the foundation of Israel, the gravity that holds the country in place. And, more important, years of reporting from Israel have taught me that there is a little bit of Sasson’s almost primitive earthiness in every Israeli—not only all those in the Likud Party on the right side of the political spectrum, but a majority of those in the Labor Party as well; not only those Israelis born in Arab countries, but those born in Israel as well. Indeed, the Israeli public is not divided fifty-fifty on the question of peace with the Palestinians. The truth is, the Israeli public is divided in three. One segment, on the far left—maybe 5 percent of the population—is ready to allow a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza tomorrow, and sincerely believes the Palestinians are ready to live in peace with the Jews. Another segment, on the far right—maybe 20 percent of the population—will never be prepared, for ideological reasons, to allow a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. They are committed to holding forever all the Land of Israel, out of either nationalist or messianic sentiments. In between these two extremes you have the Sassons, who make up probably 75 percent of the population. The more liberal Sassons side with the Labor Party, the more hard-line Sassons side with the Likud, but they all share a gut feeling that they are locked in an all-or-nothing communal struggle with the Palestinians. Today the”
― quote from From Beirut to Jerusalem

“How could so many intelligent people be so grievously wrong for such an extended period of time? How could they ignore so much overwhelming evidence that contradicted their most basic theories? These questions, too, deserve their own discipline: the sociology of error.”
― Steven Johnson, quote from The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic - and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World

“I did get the callback for Growing Pains. This time I knew it was a comedy and played it the way I saw Mike Seaver. It must have gone well. One day I was playing Atari when Mom interrupted my session. “Kirk,” she said, sticking her head in the room. “You got it! You got the pilot!”
― Kirk Cameron, quote from Still Growing: An Autobiography

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