Tim

“For the first time in their history, Americans had come up against a problem they could not begin to master with traditional American solutions -- private capital, individual initiative, hard work -- and yet the region confronting the problem happened to believe most fervently in such solutions. [...] When they finally saw the light, however, their attitude miraculously changed -- though the myth didn't -- and the American West quietly became the first and most durable example of the modern welfare state.”
― Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

“His voice was the elaborately casual voice of the tough guy in pictures. Pictures have made them all like that.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep and Other Novels

“At one stage in the heated intramural debate, ex-ACS president and longtime director Alton Ochsner took the floor and regaled his eminent colleagues with a tale intended to disarm those still unpersuaded by the proof against smoking. There was a certain Russian count, Ochsner told them, who, suspecting his attractive young wife of infidelity, advised her that he was leaving their home for an extended trip, but in fact posted himself at a nearby residence to spy on her. The very first night after his leave-taking, the count watched by moonlight as a sleigh pulled up to his house, a handsome lieutenant from the Czar's Guard bounded out, the count's wife greeted the hussar at the door and led him inside, and in a moment the couple was seen through an upstairs bedroom window in candlelit silhouette as they wildly embraced; after another moment the candle was blown out. "Proof! Proof!" said the anguished count, smiting himself on the brow. "If I only had the proof!”
― Richard Kluger, Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris

“More than anyplace else, California seems determined to prove that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is a lie.”
― Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water