Richard Ben Cramer · 1072 pages
Rating: (1.9K votes)
“(Wide open! Some of these North Dakota towns made Russell, Kansas, look urban.)”
― Richard Ben Cramer, quote from What It Takes: The Way to the White House
“If Steve Symms lost, it would turn the country over to liberals, to TEDDY KENNEDY!”
― Richard Ben Cramer, quote from What It Takes: The Way to the White House
“Reagan kept saying the deficit was Public Enemy Number One. But then he sent up a budget that would have pumped red ink up over the window sills.”
― Richard Ben Cramer, quote from What It Takes: The Way to the White House
“with loyalty oaths waving as weapons in the hands of the know-nothing right, the values of liberal education seemed to hang in the balance in 1952.”
― Richard Ben Cramer, quote from What It Takes: The Way to the White House
“They called in medics, but two got killed trying to get to Dole.”
― Richard Ben Cramer, quote from What It Takes: The Way to the White House
“In the bad old seventies, when Mondale was Veep, and the government still worried about things like fuel and noise, the Vice President flew on small, efficient DC-9S.”
― Richard Ben Cramer, quote from What It Takes: The Way to the White House
“But now, in the age of Reagan, Bush mostly flew a big old 707, the Stratoliner, a Cadillac-with-tailfins kind of plane, so heavy, noisy, and greedy for fuel that no commercial airline would be permitted to land one at an American airport.”
― Richard Ben Cramer, quote from What It Takes: The Way to the White House
“Then he dipped his finger into Dole’s shredded jacket, and with Dole’s blood traced an “M” on his forehead. That’d let the medics know he’d had a shot—another would kill him, overdose ... if a medic ever got there ... if McBryar could spot one”
― Richard Ben Cramer, quote from What It Takes: The Way to the White House
“A Governor could make all the difference in a state: KEAN: BUSH VISIT MEANS N.J. HAS A FRIEND IN WHITE HOUSE That would be the headline from Trenton, if the Governor, like Tom Kean, was a friend who’d billboard Bush’s day in the Garden State—his visit to that toxic-waste cleanup site, all the help he’d offered on that Superfund. ... Of course, if the Governor wasn’t a friend, then his appointed State Police Chief might find time to take a couple of press calls. ... That would be a different headline: BUSH VISIT WILL COST $200,000 IN OVERTIME”
― Richard Ben Cramer, quote from What It Takes: The Way to the White House
“That’s what made it worse, in the end ... when he found out. Nixon had lied to him, personally.”
― Richard Ben Cramer, quote from What It Takes: The Way to the White House
“Even a year later, Bush remarked to a friend, with uncharacteristic bluntness: “I wouldn’t care if I never see Richard Nixon again.”
― Richard Ben Cramer, quote from What It Takes: The Way to the White House
“Yeah, they told me, just be yourself ... so I did. Maybe that was the problem.”
― Richard Ben Cramer, quote from What It Takes: The Way to the White House
“Anyway, there were no bigger fans in town than Chet and Bub Dawson. (Chet was a diehard K-State fan. He’d claim: “If KU was playin’ Russia, I’d root for Russia.”)”
― Richard Ben Cramer, quote from What It Takes: The Way to the White House
“The white men on the Brinkley set were trying not to grin, like cheap lawyers at a ten-car pileup: Uh, did that mean Senator Dole didn’t think all the facts were out? Didn’t he believe the White House, that North and Poindexter were the only ones who knew? The Bobster dropped an eyebrow and rasped: “Aghh, don’t think Ripley’d believe that.”
― Richard Ben Cramer, quote from What It Takes: The Way to the White House
“Anyway, the job didn’t call for deep thinking: if you thought too much, brought your insight and intellect to bear on the problems of the nation, you’d get out front of the President, or worse still, off to the side. That’s the surest way down the trash chute in the White House. There’s only one question that the Vice President needs to ask: “What’s the President saying on this?” Anything else is begging for trouble, and George Bush had brains enough to figure that out.”
― Richard Ben Cramer, quote from What It Takes: The Way to the White House
“In fact, Reagan couldn’t remember his grandchildren’s names, and he had no friends, only the husbands of Nancy’s friends.”
― Richard Ben Cramer, quote from What It Takes: The Way to the White House
“George Bush knew five times more about the governments of the world—his own included—than Ronald Reagan ever would.”
― Richard Ben Cramer, quote from What It Takes: The Way to the White House
“The ministerial students were the worst—they were maybe one-third to one-half of each class, and this was their trade school. They came to learn the right words, all the proper formulae ... which they wrote down and memorized from the lectures of their profs.”
― Richard Ben Cramer, quote from What It Takes: The Way to the White House
“And there’d be no point: Why would he give his life over to this, if it were not for the notion that he could do something great?”
― Richard Ben Cramer, quote from What It Takes: The Way to the White House
Richard Ben Cramer
Born place: in Rochester, New York, The United States
Born date June 12, 1950
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“Miss Prism: Do not speak slightingly of the three-volume novel, Cecily. I wrote one myself in earlier days.
Cecily: Did you really, Miss Prism? How wonderfully clever you are! I hope it did not end happily? I don't like novels that end happily. They depress me so much.
Miss Prism: The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays
“within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital. But all methods for the production of surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation; and every extension of accumulation becomes again a means for the development of those methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. The law, finally, that always equilibrates the relative surplus population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the labourer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital.”
― Karl Marx, quote from Capital, Vol 1: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production
“The night. The stars. The river.”
― Edward Abbey, quote from The Monkey Wrench Gang
“I don't sleep. All night long I'm wide awake, thinking, Secrets, secrets, secrets. There are secrets in my past no one needs to know. Secrets in my present that might kill Kim and Chip. I don't want to take my secrets with me when I go. When I pass through the light, i want to be free of everything and everyone.”
― Julie Anne Peters, quote from By the Time You Read This, I'll Be Dead
“Confuse your trail, lose your trail.”
― Vikas Swarup, quote from Q & A
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