Susan Quinn > Quotes

“When the Chief Justice read me the oath,' he [FDR] later told an adviser, 'and came to the words "support the Constitution of the United States" I felt like saying: "Yes, but it's the Constitution as I understand it, flexible enough to meet any new problem of democracy--not the kind of Constitution your Court has raised up as a barrier to progress and democracy.”
― Susan Quinn, Furious Improvisation: How the Wpa and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art Out of Desperate Times

“Roosevelt spoke eloquently, in his penetrating tenor, of those 'who at this very moment are denied the greater part of what the very lowest standards of today call the necessities of life . . . I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,' he told the audience, '. . . The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”
― Susan Quinn, Furious Improvisation: How the Wpa and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art Out of Desperate Times

“In the final scene of Power, the Supreme Court justices appear as a striking abstraction: Nine scowling masks line up in a row on top of a giant podium. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes speaks the majority opinion: 'Water power, the right to convert it into electric energy, and the electric energy thus produced constitute property belonging to the United States.”
― Susan Quinn, Furious Improvisation: How the Wpa and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art Out of Desperate Times

“It is the very essence of art,' she [Hallie Flanagan:] told a group gathered in Washington . . ., 'that it exceed bounds, often including those of tradition, decorum, and that mysterious thing called taste. It is the essence of art that it shatter accepted patterns, advance into unknown territory, challenge the existing order. Art is highly explosive. To be worth its salt it must have in that salt a fair sprinkling of gunpowder.”
― Susan Quinn, Furious Improvisation: How the Wpa and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art Out of Desperate Times

“I know of no other woman who could learn to do so many things after 50 and to do them so well as you have.”
― Susan Quinn, Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady

“We are going to make a country in which no one is left out." FDR to Fraces Perkins quoted in Furious Improvisations: How the WPA and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art out of Desparate Times by Susan Quinn”
― Susan Quinn

“We know what we have to face and we know that we are ready to face it. Whatever is asked of us I am sure we can accomplish it. We are the free and unconquerable people of the United States of America.”
― Susan Quinn, Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady

“And now,” she concluded, “I shall have to work out my own salvation”
― Susan Quinn, Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady

“she was not able or willing to devote herself to just one other person. She was always going to be tied not only to a husband but to bonds of duty and friendship with many others.”
― Susan Quinn, Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady

“It seems to me the world is almost too black to behold,” Gellhorn wrote Eleanor in February 1938. “Half of it is bullied and terrorized and debased by dictators and half of it is soppy with cowardice and sloth and selfishness.”
― Susan Quinn, Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady

“You can not live at all if you do not learn to adapt yourself to your life as it happens to be.”
― Susan Quinn, Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady

“His great love, however, was the detective story, which he described as “the one dependable and unfailing anodyne in a world so realistically murderous that fictive murder becomes refuge and retreat.”
― Susan Quinn, Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady

“In thirty succinct articles, it addresses both what human rights should be universal—life, liberty, security, equality before the law, privacy, freedom of movement, freedom of expression—but also what is not acceptable to the community of nations: slavery, torture, cruel and inhuman treatment, denial of nationhood, political persecution.”
― Susan Quinn, Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady

“I am unable to lead a life based on an illusion.”
― Susan Quinn, Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady

“Love is a queer thing, it hurts but it gives so much more in return!”
― Susan Quinn, Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady

“Churchill gave the perfect riposte: “When I hear a man say that his childhood was the happiest time of his life, I think, my friend, you have had a pretty poor life.”
― Susan Quinn, Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady

“Hard position when you don’t want to be a dictator but you want your own way,” Eleanor wrote Hick.”
― Susan Quinn, Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady

“we have to face the fact that either all of us are going to die together or we are going to learn to live together and if we are to live together we have to talk.”
― Susan Quinn, Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady

“We have learned the simple truth, as Emerson said, that ‘the only way to have a friend is to be one.”
― Susan Quinn, Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady