Bruce Watson > Quotes

“It has been said that life is a tragedy to those who think and a comedy to those who feel.”
― Bruce Watson, Jon Stewart: Beyond the Moments of Zen

“Relentless criticism in childhood can internalize a parental scorn that no amount of success will silence.”
― Bruce Watson

“You don’t represent the working men,” Haywood charged. “I do,” the congressman replied in a huff. “You are an employer, are you not?” “Yes.” “Then you do not represent the working people. You represent the employers. There is nothing in common between the two classes so you - couldn’t possibly represent them both.” Despite Haywood’s belligerence, the congressman warmed to the verbal jousting. Laughing at the charge that he had never done an honest day’s work, Ames said he worked longer hours than anyone Haywood knew. This caused Big Bill to snap to attention. “Do you think six dollars too little pay for a man to work a week for?” Haywood demanded. “Don’t you think $7,500 a year too much to pay a man for making laws when only six dollars a week is paid a man for making cloth? Don’t you believe that it is more essential to mankind to make cloth than it is to make laws?” The congressman replied that his federal salary was not his chief income and that he gave it, and more, to charity. Haywood said charity would not be needed if workers were given living wages.”
― Bruce Watson, Bread and Roses: Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream

“nothing trite in SNCC’s founding statement: “Through nonviolence, courage displaces fear; love transforms hate. Acceptance dissipates prejudice, hope ends despair. Peace dominates war, faith reconciles doubt.”
― Bruce Watson, Freedom Summer: The Savage Season of 1964 That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy

“The volunteers merely dropped in for a summer, then went home to question America. Some would spearhead the events that defined the 1960s—the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the antiwar movement, the women’s movement. Others, spreading ideals absorbed in Mississippi, would be forever skeptical of authority, forever democrats with a small d, and forever touched by this single season of their youth. But first, they had to survive Freedom Summer.”
― Bruce Watson, Freedom Summer: The Savage Season of 1964 That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy

“We have entered the Age of Light. The ages of steam and coal are long gone. With oil clinging to power, light is emerging as our deus ex machine. Light goes where nothing else can, gets there faster than anything else could, and brings back the images. If there are limits to light, other than its cosmic speed limit, we have not tested them. If there is a final answer to the question "What is light?" we have not found it.”
― Bruce Watson, Light: A Radiant History from Creation to the Quantum Age

“She taught me to be grateful for my life regardless of what that entailed, and that’s directly related to the image of Christ on the cross and the example of sacrifice that he gave us.” But the Stephen Colbert who speaks”
― Bruce Watson, Stephen Colbert: Beyond Truthiness

“But there was a time when light waged a heroic battle with darkness. It was a time when night skies were not bleached by urban glare, when candles were not romantic novelties, when light was the source of all warmth and safety. For the vast majority of human history, each sunrise was a celebration; each waxing moon stirred hope of nights less terrifying. And to anyone caught unprepared— in dark woods, on echoing streets, even at home when lamps flickered and failed— light was, simply, life.”
― Bruce Watson, Light: A Radiant History from Creation to the Quantum Age

“Light takes darkness vanish and worlds reappear. Light opens each day with a blaring overture, then throws its wands to earth and casts diamonds on lakes and oceans. Each night, lights tricks make the stars seem alive.”
― Bruce Watson, Light: A Radiant History from Creation to the Quantum Age

“With the two sides entrenched, each began a campaign for public sympathy. The focus was wages. How much did Lawrence textile workers really earn? Ettor told the press that the average mill wage was $6 a week; mill owners countered that it was $9.71 The difference depended on who did the math, and how. Ettor was using a mathematical mean, dividing the mills’ $150,000 weekly payroll by twenty-five thousand workers.72 Mill owners relied on what statisticians call the median. Taking a weaver’s average wage of $13 a week and a doffer’s average of $4.50, they found the midpoint, then rounded up. Strikers protested. For every weaver, they pointed out, there were dozens of doffers, sweepers, and bobbin boys earning $4.50 a week or less. Mill owners countered that such low pay was earned only by the least skilled workers, few in number and not prime wage earners. But neither weekly wage figure factored in the several weeks each year that work was slow and thousands were laid off.”
― Bruce Watson, Bread and Roses: Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream

“Knock knock!” “Who’s there?” the crowd responded. “Unlimited union and corporate campaign contributions.” “Unlimited union and corporate campaign contributions who?” “That’s the thing,” Colbert said. “I don’t think I should have to tell you.”
― Bruce Watson, Stephen Colbert: Beyond Truthiness

“love transforms hate. Acceptance dissipates prejudice, hope ends despair. Peace dominates war, faith reconciles doubt.”
― Bruce Watson, Freedom Summer: The Savage Season of 1964 That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy

“all clung to the hope that whenever America fell short of its ideals, young Americans could restore them.”
― Bruce Watson, Freedom Summer: The Savage Season of 1964 That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy

“American students have finally come around to support something that must be done.”
― Bruce Watson, Freedom Summer: The Savage Season of 1964 That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy

“Presently we began to have our slices of the national cake,” F. Scott Fitzgerald remembered, “and our idealism only flared up when the newspapers made melodrama out of such stories as Harding and the Ohio Gang or Sacco and Vanzetti.”
― Bruce Watson, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind

“Stephen Colbert still mourns. “Grief,” he said, “will always accept the invitation to appear. It’s got plenty of time for you.”
― Bruce Watson, Stephen Colbert: Beyond Truthiness

“Light is the magician of the cosmos.”
― Bruce Watson, Light: A Radiant History from Creation to the Quantum Age

“Atrocities, including the lynching of more than five hundred Mississippi Negroes—more than any other state—were ennobled as righteous. Lynching went unpunished, murder was “self-defense,” and many towns announced their meanness in a road sign—“Nigger, Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on You Here.” Whites who disapproved learned to keep quiet. Criticism of Jim Crow became disloyalty to be dealt with, Cash noted, by “making such criticism so dangerous that none but a madman would risk it.”
― Bruce Watson, Freedom Summer: The Savage Season of 1964 That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy

“A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him. They must even upon most occasions be more; otherwise it would be impossible for him to bring up a family, and the race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation. —Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations1”
― Bruce Watson, Bread and Roses: Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream

“For the rest of the twentieth century, Mississippi struggled to put the past in its proper place. The lessons were bitter, and some refused to learn them. In the years following Freedom Summer, rancor and hatred reigned. Torn between nonviolence and a surging militance, blacks split into factions, arguing about everything, even funding for child care. Marches continued, and cops continued roughing up marchers. The Klan rallied in public, plotted in private, and made a last-ditch stand for its ludicrous lost cause of white supremacy. But with time, the state haunted by the Civil War surrendered to the inevitable future. Old customs died out with old people, and new generations found neither the energy nor the hatred needed to prop up Jim Crow.”
― Bruce Watson, Freedom Summer: The Savage Season of 1964 That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy

“Hearts starve as well as bodies: Give us Bread, but give us Roses!”
― Bruce Watson, Bread and Roses: Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream

“...while Colbert wrote in the back seat of the Comedy Central Car, Media spun out of control. Back when Colbert was working Second City weird comedians had little competition. TV news seemed sane, its anchors staid, and the greying men behind the desk considered themselves journalists, not entertainers. In those final pre-Web years, newspapers were mostly reliable, free of the cluttered competition of websites, tweets and blogs. But a decade later with 24-7 cable spreading, and every poll and pundit saying whatever it took to get attention, the comic could scarcely be more outrageous than the media circus. As the age of Fox News and the Drudge Report dawned, opinion replaced fact, rumor was treated as truth, and no conspiracy, however trivial or trumped up, went unnoticed.”
― Bruce Watson, Stephen Colbert: Beyond Truthiness

“But the bullet that killed Herbert Lee set off a string of firecrackers that clustered in a single summer, a season so radically different, so idealistic, so savage, so daring, that it redefined freedom in America.”
― Bruce Watson, Freedom Summer: The Savage Season of 1964 That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy