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D Quotes

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All D Quotes

“During the 1960s, and again in the 1970s, growth in manufacturing productivity in the United Kingdom was the lowest of all the seven major industrial countries in the world. During the 1980s, our annual rate of growth of output per head in manufacturing has been the highest of all the seven major industrial countries.”

“During the 1960s, one neighborhood in San Francisco had the lowest income, the highest unemployment rate, the highest proportion of families with incomes under four thousand dollars a year, the least educational attainment, the highest tuberculosis rate, and the highest proportion of substandard housing ... That neighborhood was called Chinatown. Yet, in 1965, there were only five persons of Chinese ancestry committed to prison in the entire state of California.”

“During the 1970s and 1980s, the popular television soap opera As The World Turns portrayed sunrise during the opening credits and sunset during the closing credits... The soap-opera sunrise showed the sun moving toward the left as it rose rather than to the right. They obviously had gotten a piece of film showing a sunset and played it in reverse... Had they called their local astrophysicists, any one of us might have recommended that if they needed to save money, they could have shown the sunset in a mirror before they showed it running backward.”

“During the 1980s, a remote viewing project called Stargate was done at Fort Meade. It used binaural beat tones, transmitted through earphones, that altered brain waves. A hemi-sync that device played two different frequencies into each ear was found to produce altered states of consciousness. Perhaps this technology was derived from these experiments done in the 1960s on MKULTRA subjects.”

“During the 1992 election I concluded as early as my first visit to New Hampshire that Bill Clinton was hateful in his behavior to women, pathological as a liar, and deeply suspect when it came to money in politics. I have never had to take any of that back, whereas if you look up what most of my profession was then writing about the beefy, unscrupulous 'New Democrat,' you will be astonished at the quantity of sheer saccharine and drool. Anyway, I kept on about it even after most Republicans had consulted the opinion polls and decided it was a losing proposition, and if you look up the transcript of the eventual Senate trial of the president—only the second impeachment hearing in American history—you will see that the last order of business is a request (voted down) by the Senate majority leader to call Carol and me as witnesses. So I can dare to say that at least I saw it through.”

“During the 1999 debate over Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China President Bill Clinton said, 'In opening the economy of China, the agreement will create unprecedented opportunities for American farmers, workers and companies to compete successfully in China's market. WRONG: Our trade deficit with China has increased from $83 billion in 2001 to a record breaking $342 billion in 2014.”

“During the 20th century, the Forestry Commission (FC) bought land and planted it with commercial forestry crops on a massive scale. In most cases the land was bought from cash-strapped private land-owners who were required, prior to afforestation, to terminate or otherwise end farm tenancies. What is less well known about this period of forestry expansion is that following purchase the FC embarked on an active programme of property ruination, involving the abandonment and deliberate destruction of hundreds of vacated residential properties, mainly farmsteads. The ruins of these farmsteads are still visible in many forests currently managed by Forestry and Land Scotland (FLS) and act as a poignant symbol of Scotland's clearance legacy.”

“During the 20th century, we came to understand that the essence of all substances - their colour, texture, hardness and so forth - is set by their structure, on scales far smaller even than a microscope can see. Everything on Earth is made of atoms, which are, especially in living things, combined together in intricate molecular assemblages.”

“During the act of making something, I experience a kind of blissful absence of the self and a loss of time. When I am done, I return to both feeling as restored as if I had been on a trip. I almost never get this feeling any other way. I once spent sixteen hours making 150 wedding invitations by hand and was not for one instance of that time tempted to eat or look at my watch. By contrast, if seated at the computer, I check my email conservatively 30,000 times a day. When I am writing, I must have a snack, call a friend, or abuse myself every ten minutes. I used to think that this was nothing more than the difference between those things we do for love and those we do for money. But that can't be the whole story. I didn't always write for a living, and even back when it was my most fondly held dream to one day be able to do so, writing was always difficult. Writing is like pulling teeth. From my dick.”

“During the afternoons the only thing that seems to hold my interest is baking. I go through my recipe books. Soft-centered biscuits, cakes slathered with icing, cupcakes piled up in pyramids on round plates. Pete doesn't say anything, although every morning he takes out the rubbish bags filled with stale muffins and half-eaten banana loaves. The only thoughts that seem to distract me from babies are those memories of Paris. A gray cold, tall men, black coffee, sweet pastries, Mama laughing, with her hair and scarf streaming behind her. The smell of chocolate and bread.”

“During the ages of faith the Church argued, not illogically, that any degree of cruelty towards sinners and heretics was justified, if there was a chance that it could save them, or others, from the eternal torments of hell. Thus, in the name of the religion of love, hundreds of thousands of people were not merely killed but atrociously tortured in ways that made the gas chambers of Beslen seem humane.”

“During the air war of 1944, a four-man combat crew on a B-17 bomber took a vow to never abandon one another no matter how desperate the situation. The aircraft was hit by flak during a mission and went into a terminal dive, and the pilot ordered everyone to bail out. The top turret gunner obeyed the order, but the ball turret gunner discovered that a piece of flak had jammed his turret and he could not get out. The other three men in his pact could have bailed out with the parachutes, but they stayed with him until the plan hit the ground and exploded. They all died.”

“During the American Revolution, the British offered emancipation to any enslaved person who fought on their side. This military tactic infuriated the Patriots and caused pandemonium on the southern plantations as thousands of slaves escaped and joined the British Army or sought refuge behind enemy lines.”

“During the Batista Regime the Secret police was everywhere. They attended every political and social function, watched who went to church and were even at the beach. Cars with Florida license plates, originally thought to belong to tourists, were in fact driven by Batista’s secret police. The thinly veiled ploy was revealed when you saw that the cars were filled with ominous looking men brandishing automatic weapons. Sometimes the secret police disguised themselves as street vendors. Their informers or stoolpigeons were known as chivatos. Batista also maintained a paramilitary force that was made up of street gangs that acted more like professional political thugs.”

“During the Battle of Britain the question "fighter or fighter-bomber?" had been decided once and for all: The fighter can only be used as a bomb carrier with lasting effect when sufficient air superiority has been won.”

“During the Boom Years, it was so easy to lose sight of basic values. For example, there was lots of nonsense said and written about the so-called "New Economy." Some people said all economic laws have been overturned! Then all the problems developed. Corporations were heavily fined for illegalities. Many of their senior-level executives were indicted, convicted, and sent to prison.”

“During the Bosnian War in 1992, the Serb forces took over the Prijedor municipality. The Serbian Democratic Party (SDS) repeatedly broadcasted the Serb forces’ capture of Prijedor on radio as a display of significant victory. For further hostile takeover, 400 men were added to the Serb forces in Cirkin Polje (town in Prijedor) to seize Prijedor’s governing bodies such as the municipality, post office, police, bank, courts etc. By April, they successfully captured these government entities. This forceful takeover by Serb politicians was declared to be an illegal coup d’état by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The coup was a cold blooded, pre-planned strategic effort to capture Prijedor and convert it into a pure Serb municipality. These strategic plans were never concealed. Milomir Stakić played an important role in the strategic capture by the Serb forces.”

“During the Bosnian war in the late 1990s, I spent several days traveling around the country with Susan Sontag and her son, my dear friend David Rieff. On one occasion, we made a special detour to the town of Zenica, where there was reported to be a serious infiltration of outside Muslim extremists: a charge that was often used to slander the Bosnian government of the time. We found very little evidence of that, but the community itself was much riven as between Muslim, Croat, and Serb. No faction was strong enough to predominate, each was strong enough to veto the other's candidate for the chairmanship of the city council. Eventually, and in a way that was characteristically Bosnian, all three parties called on one of the town's few Jews and asked him to assume the job. We called on him, and found that he was also the resident intellectual, with a natural gift for synthesizing matters. After we left him, Susan began to chortle in the car. 'What do you think?' she asked. 'Do you think that the only dentist and the only shrink in Zenica are Jewish also?' It would be dense to have pretended not to see her joke.”

“During the brief war with Iran, I found myself several times trapped in the neighborhood bomb shelter with people I barely knew. It was stressful. The missiles were frightening, but there was something straightforward and clear about them. People, on the other hand, are a lot more ambiguous and confusing, especially when they’re crammed into a small, closed space, listening to sirens and explosions on the other side of a concrete wall. But the explosive reality outside the shelter was soon forgotten, replaced by an unpleasant group dynamic that reminded me of a bad high school field trip: Who ends up sitting in the unsafe spot right opposite the door? When are we allowed to open it and leave? How do I get away from the sweaty neighbor who keeps checking his WhatsApp updates? And how the hell do you explain to the sad French Bulldog who’s in love with your left leg that you’re a happily married man? And yet all these worries, exasperating though they are, pale in comparison with the one really important question: When the missile attack finally ends and we open that steel door, what kind of world will be waiting for us out there?”