Kit Morris > Kit's Quotes

“The numbers are unclear, but contemporaries estimated abortions at one to every five or six live births in the 1850s. A Michigan Board of Health estimate in the 1880s claimed that one-third of all pregnancies ended in an abortion.”
― Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896

“Contract freedom quickly revealed itself as a delusion when those negotiating contracts were so incommensurate in wealth and power.”
― Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896

“Quantum of Solace – the amount of comfort. Yes, I suppose you could say that all love and friendship is based in the end on that.”
― Ian Fleming, For Your Eyes Only

“When the other person not only makes you feel insecure but actually seems to want to destroy you, it’s obviously the end. The Quantum of Solace stands at zero.”
― Ian Fleming, For Your Eyes Only

“It’s to the effect that America has progressed from infancy to senility without having passed through a period of maturity.”
― Ian Fleming, For Your Eyes Only

“When the people who felt like losers united around their shared psychological sense of grievance, their enemies felt somehow more overwhelming, not less;”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: America's Second Civil War and the Divisive Legacy of Richard Nixon 1965-72

“It was as if someone had called to this boom of babies sired by the domesticity-starved veterans of World War II, “Ye shall be as gods.” And they believed it. Because they were told it all the time.”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: America's Second Civil War and the Divisive Legacy of Richard Nixon 1965-72

“Do Americans not hate each other enough to fantasize about killing one another, in cold blood, over political and cultural disagreements? It would be hard to argue they do not. How did Nixonland end? It has not ended yet.”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: America's Second Civil War and the Divisive Legacy of Richard Nixon 1965-72

“world run according to the Gospel of Richard Nixon, where good guys were always good no matter what they actually did, bad guys were always and everywhere ontologically evil, and no one will be safe until “ ‘we’ crack down on ‘them,’ occasionally adopting their tactics.”
― Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan

“Haldeman exposed the other side of the Silent Majority rhetorical coin: it welcomed division. It welcomed hate. For if the world was divided between good and evil, hating evil was the appropriate response. And what violations of procedural nicety weren’t permissible in order to vanquish evil?”
― Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan

“America had not yet become Reagan’s America. Not yet. Reagan’s America would embrace an almost official cult of optimism—the belief that America could do no wrong. Or, to put it another way, that if America did it, it was by definition not wrong. That would come later. But signs were already pointing in that direction.”
― Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan

“There is more than one kind of freedom," said Aunt Lydia. "Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“But Willa knew what she meant. She had felt that way during her own childhood; she’d felt like a watchful, wary adult housed in a little girl’s body. And yet nowadays, paradoxically, it often seemed to her that from behind her adult face a child about eleven years old was still gazing out at the world.”
― Anne Tyler, Clock Dance

“Sibilia could not get past two things: (1) that the USFL’s dysfunction was the greatest culprit in the league’s failings, and (2) Trump was awful. “He was extremely arrogant and I thought that he was obviously trying to play the game. He wanted an NFL franchise . . . the USFL was a cheap way in.”
― Jeff Pearlman, Football For A Buck: The Crazy Rise and Crazier Demise of the USFL

“SPECTRE – The Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion.”
― Ian Fleming, Thunderball

“Steelers radio broadcaster Myron Cope of station WTAE came up with the idea a few days before the Colts game of having fans wave a gold or black towel, much in the same tradition of Miami’s handkerchief wavers. Thousands of fans complied with Cope’s request, and a new tradition was born. The Steelers, according to legend, received special powers with the towel fluttering throughout the stands. Cope claimed that the towel also “inflicted unexpected problems to the opposing teams.” The “Terrible Towels,” as they were called, were quickly mass-produced in Pittsburgh.”
― Joe Zagorski, The NFL in the 1970s: Pro Football's Most Important Decade

“Finley said that he chose green and gold in honor of his favorite college football team, Notre Dame.”
― Radom Todd, Winning Ugly: A Visual History of the Most Bizarre Baseball Uniforms Ever Worn

“In 1961, the National Football League's owners voted to sign a national television contract with CBS, and share the revenues from that deal equally among all of its teams, regardless of market size or national appeal. This was important at the time, when the individual team television revenues were wildly disparate and made up a sizable portion of a team's income. It would become crucial in the decades ahead, when television exploded into the largest source of revenue in professional football.”
― Michael MacCambridge, America's Game

“What those who were contemptuous of sports misunderstood was not merely that a middle-class sports fan might revere football to the same degree that an inveterate theatergoer revered Shakespeare, but that he might do so for many of the same reasons.”
― Michael MacCambridge, America's Game

“When you think of baseball, you immediately think of the New York Yankees. When you think of golf, Bobby Jones comes to mind. When you think of boxing, it's Joe Louis. One of these days when people think of football, I want them to think of the Cleveland Browns.”
― Michael MacCambridge, America's Game

“By the middle of the summer, the team was even bearing his name. An early name-the-team contest had resulted in the club announcing, in the spring of 1946, that it would be known as the Cleveland Panthers. But when the owner of a failed minor league franchise of the ’30s claimed rights to the name, Brown decided to ditch it.”
― Michael MacCambridge, America's Game

“Brown had too many quality players for the thirty-three-man roster. Rather than waive them to other teams in the AAFC, he devised a secret plan with owner McBride by which several players who had been cut would land jobs with the Zone/Yellow Cab Co., with schedules arranged so that they could report to League Park in Cleveland, where the Browns practiced. Thus was born the “taxi squad” in pro football.”
― Michael MacCambridge, America's Game

“Here's what I propose,” he said. “At the end of each football season, I suggest that we pool the names of all eligible college seniors. Then we make our selections in inverse order of the standings—that is, the lowest-ranked team picks first. We do this round after round until we have exhausted the supply of college players.”
― Michael MacCambridge, America's Game

“(Brown, incidentally, had a contract with Riddell that paid him a royalty for every mask sold, bringing him millions in the decades ahead.)”
― Michael MacCambridge, America's Game

“With only one proven quarterback in Baltimore, Unitas sensed his chances for success were better there. Thus would the relative fortunes of the Cleveland Browns and Baltimore Colts be forever changed.”
― Michael MacCambridge, America's Game

“The principle that Veeck pointed to was a simple one. Since every major league game involved two competing clubs, and since the selling of television rights required no investment on the part of the home club, he reasoned it was only fair that those rights fees be split equally in each market between the home and visiting clubs.”
― Michael MacCambridge, America's Game

“The NFL had been eyeing New Orleans for its next franchise anyway. So a thinly veiled quid pro quo was offered—a franchise for New Orleans in exchange for the exemption”
― Michael MacCambridge, America's Game

“Hunt had thought of the name while watching his children playing with one of the hot novelties of the period, the Wham-O company's high-bouncing Super Ball.”
― Michael MacCambridge, America's Game

“You only live twice:
Once when you are born
And once when you look death in the face”
― Ian Fleming, You Only Live Twice