David Maraniss > Quotes

“I remember once he began a speech to us by asking ‘What is the meaning of love?’ ” recalled Bob Skoronski. “And this is what he said. He said, ‘Anybody can love something that is beautiful or smart or agile. You will never know love until you can love something that isn’t beautiful, isn’t bright, isn’t glamorous. It takes a special person to love something unattractive, someone unknown. That is the test of love. Everybody can love someone’s strengths and somebody’s good looks. But can you accept someone for his inabilities?’ And he drew a parallel that day to football. You might have a guy playing next to you who maybe isn’t perfect, but you’ve got to love him, and maybe that love would enable you to help him. And maybe you will do something more to overcome a difficult situation in football because of that love. He didn’t want us to be picking on each other, but thinking, What can I do to make it easier for my teammate?”
― David Maraniss, When Pride Still Mattered: A Life Of Vince Lombardi

“As integral as religion was to his sense of self, it was not until he reached West Point and combined his spiritual discipline with Blaik’s military discipline that his coaching persona began to take its mature form. Everything he knew about organizing a team and preparing it to play its best, Lombardi said later, he learned at West Point. “It all came from Red Blaik.”
― David Maraniss, When Pride Still Mattered: A Life Of Vince Lombardi

“Go about your work with a quiet confidence that cannot be shake...No matter what happens, remember if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you can move mountains.' (Ducky Drake, UCLA Track Coach)”
― David Maraniss, Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World

“There never was a champion who, to himself, was a good loser. There is a vast difference between a good sport and a good loser.” In Blaik’s opinion the “purpose of the game is to win. To dilute the will to win is to destroy the purpose of the game.” In this, as in most matters, he was influenced by General MacArthur. He never forgot MacArthur’s words: “There is no substitute for victory.”
― David Maraniss, When Pride Still Mattered: A Life Of Vince Lombardi

“Every day Lombardi heard Cox lecture on the meaning of character—“an integration of habits of conduct superimposed on temperament, the will exercised on disposition, thought, emotion and action.” It was man’s obligation, Cox said, to use his will “to elicit the right and good free actions and to refrain from wrong and evil actions.” While man was blessed with intellect and free will, he was ennobled only when he sublimated individual desires “to join others in pursuit of common good.” Cox lamented that the modern world was turning away from that notion, and “the vaunted liberty which was to make us free has eventuated in a more galling servitude to man’s lower nature.”
― David Maraniss, When Pride Still Mattered: A Life Of Vince Lombardi

“Late on weekend nights, when Vince was at last free from athletics, he took Marie out to his favorite haunts with the Palaus and other friends. They often drove up Route 9W to Englewood Cliffs for a late meal at Leo’s and then some band music at the Rustic Cabin, where they fell into the habit of buying a beer and steak sandwich for a performer who came over to their table to chat after his closing set, a skinny young Italian crooner from Hoboken named Frank Sinatra.”
― David Maraniss, When Pride Still Mattered: A Life Of Vince Lombardi

“The time was ordinary, 24 seconds, but the victory was historic. From that crowded little red house in Clarksville, out of an extended family of twenty-two kids, from a childhood of illness and leg braces, out of a small historically black college that had no scholarships, from a country where she could be hailed as a heroine and yet denied lunch at a counter, Skeeter had become golden, sweeping the sprints in Rome.”
― David Maraniss, Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World

“A date was soon set for the wedding. He and Marie were married on Saturday, August 31, 1940, at the Church of Our Lady of Refuge on East 196th Street in the Bronx. The nuptial mass was performed by the Reverend Jeremiah F. Nemecek, a Fordham football fan who idolized the Seven Blocks of Granite”
― David Maraniss, When Pride Still Mattered: A Life Of Vince Lombardi

“she had married Vince because he seemed solid, religious and faithful, unlike her father. She believed, as he did, in the sacredness and lifelong commitment of marriage. She told herself that she would have to adjust.”
― David Maraniss, When Pride Still Mattered: A Life Of Vince Lombardi

“Oftentimes the child is the father of the man.”
― David Maraniss, The Prince of Tennessee: Al Gore Meets His Fate

“Again on Rose Hill with all the familiar sounds, sights and smells, dank gymnasium office, trainer Jake’s old barber chair, the Keating Hall clock tower, Jesuits in cassocks clucking along, lunches of linguine and calamari on Arthur Avenue, leaves and mud on the practice field, thud and smack of leather upon leather as dusk enveloped the Bronx, maroon and gold, we do or die notes drifting over from band rehearsal—Lombardi was in his element, restored. Football as religion. The T a catechism from which he preached. And God was in the details.”
― David Maraniss, When Pride Still Mattered: A Life Of Vince Lombardi

“In this dream, as he recounted it in Dreams from My Father, Barack rode a bus across a landscape of “deep fields and grass and hills that bucked against an orange sky” until he reached a jail cell and found “father before me, with only a cloth wrapped around his waist.” The father, slender, with hairless arms, saw his son and said, “Look at you, so tall—and so thin, gray hairs, even,” and Obama approached him and hugged him and wept as Barack Hussein Obama Sr. said the words Barack Hussein Obama II would never hear in real life: “Barack, I always wanted to tell you how much I loved you.” Genevieve remembered the morning he awoke from that dream: “I remember him being just so overwhelmed, and I so badly wanted to fix him, help him fix that pain. He woke up from that dream and started talking about it. I think he was haunted.” She”
― David Maraniss, Barack Obama: The Story

“GEORGE ROMNEY, HAIR SLICKED BACK from his broad forehead, his tanned mug exuding executive-class prosperity, came to Grosse Pointe ready to hit the streets as a protester.”
― David Maraniss, Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story

“The “big wheels” of Detroit, as a local society writer called them, appeared at the Ford Auditorium’s semicircular front drive in midnight-black limos and emerged in dark tuxedos and dark business suits. It was a warm night, but that did not curtail the number of women wearing mink stoles over short, bright-colored dresses with matching satin shoes.”
― David Maraniss, Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story

“top cop job at”
― David Maraniss, Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story

“Giacalone lived in a redbrick palace on Balfour Street in Grosse Pointe Park between East Jefferson and the Detroit River. Only the highest-ranking mobsters, of whom he was one, had homes there.”
― David Maraniss, Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story

“Now Solidarity House was located at 8000 East Jefferson on property that was hauntingly familiar. Edsel and Eleanor Ford once had owned a riverfront mansion on that very site. The family moved there when Henry II, the oldest of four children, was four, and left when he was nine, moving on up to a new mansion in Grosse Pointe Shores designed by Albert Kahn. The old place on East Jefferson was gone now, but the original boathouse still stood in back of an undistinguished building that looked more like a cut-rate motel than UAW headquarters, a center of the labor movement.”
― David Maraniss, Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story

“the world car market had changed in the fourteen months since that 1962 auto show, when big cars seemed resurgent and Henry Ford II had talked so confidently about Detroit’s position against foreign competition. In 1963, for the first time, even as the Big Three were enjoying their best sales year ever, more than half the cars in the world were made outside the United States, with estimates that the gap would only widen year by year from then on. Volkswagen was rising, and even Japan was beginning to stir, both taking hold of the worldwide small car market. Between 375,000 and 400,000 imports were sold in the United States in 1963, and estimates for 1964 were up to a half million. One reason, experts said, was that the compact cars the U.S. automakers started manufacturing in the late fifties in response to an earlier foreign surge were getting so much bigger every year that by now that might as well be classified as midsize vehicles.”
― David Maraniss, Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story

“In many ways the philosophy at West Point was similar to a way of life that Lombardi had learned earlier at Fordham from the Jesuits. There was a direct line from one to the next, from religion to the military to football, from the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius to the football regimen of Colonel Blaik. Both emphasized discipline, order, organization, planning, attention to detail, repetition, the ability to adjust to different situations and remain flexible in pursuit of a goal while sustaining an obsession with one big idea.”
― David Maraniss, When Pride Still Mattered: A Life Of Vince Lombardi

“but aside from the cars the stars of the show were some make-believe characters called Muppets, still seven years away from Sesame Street fame. The auto show special two years earlier had been critiqued for being too dry; this one went to the other extreme. They were “clever little puppets,” noted one reviewer, “but there must be another way to add entertainment . . . with more auto-related features.”
― David Maraniss, Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story

“though he would deliver that speech twenty-eight miles away, in Ann Arbor, no place seemed more important to his mission than Detroit, a great city that honored labor, built cars, made music, promoted civil rights, and helped lift working people into the middle class. “This city and its people are the herald of hope in America,” he said. “Prosperity in America must begin here in Detroit.”
― David Maraniss, Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story

“he and Smokey would exchange pickup lines and laments and rhymes until they had possible stanzas for a new song. One came up with “You got a smile so bright / you know you coulda been a candle.” The other responded with “I’m holding you so tight / You know you coulda been a handle.” And eventually they had composed “The Way You Do the Things You Do.”
― David Maraniss, Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story

“Reuther yearned to be near the center of power, and Johnson was masterly at the twin arts of flattery and manipulation, making Reuther feel that he was the president’s confidant.”
― David Maraniss, Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story

“Competitive sports keeps alive in all of us a spirit of vitality and enterprise. It teaches the strong to know when they are weak and the brave to face themselves when they are afraid. To be proud and unbending in defeat, yet humble and gentle in victory. To master ourselves before we attempt to master others. To learn to laugh, yet never forget how to weep, and it gives a predominance of courage over timidity.”
― David Maraniss, When Pride Still Mattered: A Life Of Vince Lombardi

“Men needed the test of competition to find their better selves, Lombardi insisted, whether it was in sports, politics or business.”
― David Maraniss, When Pride Still Mattered: A Life Of Vince Lombardi

“I have a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.” This was nine weeks before the March on Washington, when King would deliver another version of the same refrain that would become etched in history, eventually considered the most famous American speech of the twentieth century. What he said at Cobo on that Sunday in June was virtually lost to history, overwhelmed by what was to come, but the first time King dreamed his dream at a large public gathering, he dreamed it in Detroit.”
― David Maraniss, Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story

“In a democratic society there are rules -- written and un-written -- which must be followed if the free institutions of that society are to endure. They include the right to protest -- even against the freedoms which allow those protests. But they do not include the right to interfere with the rights of others without due process of law.”
― David Maraniss

“Like many very rich people, Ford did not have to sell himself; Iacocca knew no other way. “He had a lot of ability,” Ford later said of Iacocca. “Unfortunately his ability lies ninety-nine percent in sales. But it isn’t only in selling cars—it’s selling everything.”
― David Maraniss, Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story

“Lombardi himself was partly responsible for this. He alone among the men of the four great Fordham front walls emerged as a large enough figure later in life to carry the legend. But this was also the work of the storytellers. Grantland Rice and Damon Runyon and their brethren glorified the 1936 line above all others, and their fraternal heir, Tim Cohane, continued the tradition. There is something to be said for the way they presented the world, looking for the romantic aspects of human nature through the playing of games, preferring it to what would come later, the cynicism of modern journalism and its life-deadening focus on money, controversy and man’s inevitable fall from grace. The problem with the storytellers was not their exaltation of myth, but their pursuit of the ideal to the exclusion of reality, allowing for the perpetuation of the fallacy of the innocent past.”
― David Maraniss, When Pride Still Mattered: A Life Of Vince Lombardi

“At Saints, ethical values were largely passed on not by the priests and nuns but by Vince Lombardi, who found his pulpit everywhere, on the playing field, in the classroom and at schoolwide auditorium meetings. He was the one person to whom Sister Bap acceded. Dorothy Bachmann, salutatorian at Saints in 1944, thought “all the nuns loved him. They were not afraid of Vince, but they respected him for the way he presented his values to the students.” Saints football, with its discipline, subservience and teamwork, was considered the ideal demonstration of proper teenage behavior, and Lombardi the purveyor nonpareil of the football philosophy.”
― David Maraniss, When Pride Still Mattered: A Life Of Vince Lombardi