Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers Quotes

“The press in New York has tended to favor New Society in every period, and to take it seriously, if only because it provides "news.”
― Tom Wolfe, Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers

“It got to be an American custom, like talk shows, Face the Nation, marriage counseling, marathon encounters, or zoning hearings.”
― Tom Wolfe, Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers

“...and now, in the season of the Radical Chic, the Black Panthers.”
― Tom Wolfe, Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers

“he stationed himself where writers are supposed to station themselves, off to the side, observing, never quite belonging. It’s lonely, but the social position did allow him a glimpse of what was emerging—that the new coastal elites had made themselves insufferable to working-class Americans, and that sooner or later there would be hell to pay.”
― Tom Wolfe, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers

“The white wives can’t help noticing the gap between these warriors and the sniveling bankers they married.”
― Tom Wolfe, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers

“the lust for the primitive. There is something so cosseted, so tame, so safe, about being very rich that the folks imprisoned in that gilded cage turn their fantasies to the raw, the sexy, the violent.”
― Tom Wolfe, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers

“Instagram activism: How much of all this is about caring for the oppressed, and how much is about the image of you caring about the oppressed?”
― Tom Wolfe, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers

“It’s just that these people want to care in a way that makes them look gorgeous.”
― Tom Wolfe, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers

“Life is a contest for status. Some people think humans are driven by money, or love, or to heal the wounds they suffered in childhood, but Wolfe put the relentless scramble up the pecking order at the center of his worldview. It gave him his brilliant eye for surfaces, for the careful way people put on their social displays.”
― Tom Wolfe, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers

“Wolfe was there at the dawn of twentieth-century one-downsmanship, the way you could rise to the social stratosphere by donning peasant and revolutionary garb.”
― Tom Wolfe, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers

“They had to be morally avant-garde, able to articulate the luxury opinions fashionable at that exact moment. They had to perform all these inversions—rising to the social stratosphere by ostentatiously demonstrating their solidarity with the oppressed, securing their place atop the structures of power by striking radical poses, and pretending to support tearing those structures down.”
― Tom Wolfe, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers

“He had the ability to name the status rules that envelop us, which most of us are aware of only semiconsciously.”
― Tom Wolfe, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers

“Life is a contest for status. Some people think humans are driven by money, or love, or to heal the wounds they suffered in childhood, but Wolfe put the relentless scramble up the pecking order at the center of his worldview. It”
― Tom Wolfe, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers

“—and every woman in the room thinks of her husband … with his cocoa-butter jowls and Dior Men’s Boutique pajamas … ducking into the bathroom and locking the door and turning the shower on, so he can say later that he didn’t hear a thing—”
― Tom Wolfe, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers

“The only power we have is the power to destroy, the power to disrupt.”
― Tom Wolfe, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers