Richard Norton Quotes

#1. You have to imprint your own style. People like authentic personalities.

Dexter Hawk

#2. I was 14 years old in August of 1968 and had earned the money and had managed to get tickets as a guest of the Massachusetts delegation to the Republican convention in Miami and where I was on the floor in the Rockefeller demonstrations.

Richard Norton Smith

#3. Richard Nixon as a 12-year-old was given a portrait of Lincoln that he hung over his bed. Nixon also justified what would later be seen as abuses of power by comparing America in the Vietnam era to the country during the Civil War.

Richard Norton Smith

#4. I'm very old-fashioned - I don't operate with an agenda. If you're a biographer, you want to be passionate about what you're doing but dispassionate about how you do it.

Richard Norton Smith

#5. Presidents in wartime, embattled presidents, unpopular presidents, they all look to Lincoln. He's their patron saint because no president was more embattled or more unpopular than Lincoln was during his presidency. We think he was born on Mount Rushmore. Not so.

Richard Norton Smith

#6. David Pietrusza has a gift for making the past both real and
dramatically gripping.

Richard Norton Smith

#7. Tell people the truth, they laugh. The truth is so tragic they have to pretend it's a joke.

Lucille Kallen

#8. All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.

John Irving

#9. There's no excuse for a dull book, a dull museum, or a dull speech. Especially when dealing with history - the most fascinating subject I know.

Richard Norton Smith

#10. I need physics more than friends.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

#11. Ask a true scientist a very profound question on his science, and he will be
silent. Ask a true religious person a very simple question on his religion, and he will be frenzied.

Kedar Joshi

#12. When we're talking about the "American response" to any disaster, it's not just a government response, an official response, it's a popular response.

Richard Norton Smith

#13. And then we'll go to Tiffany's and get you a ring. And then
" he turned swiftly to look into her fade
" when can we get married?

Maud Hart Lovelace

#14. She was the temptress who had ensnared the first man, and who still continued her work at damnation; she was the being who is feeble, dangerous, mysteriously troubling. And even more than her body of perdition, he hated her loving soul.

Guy De Maupassant

#15. One of hardest for any historian or a biographer to do is to capture convincingly on paper something as ethereal as charisma. It's a relative term, and different generations define it differently.

Richard Norton Smith

#16. The American people are not uniquely, but characteristically the most spontaneously generous in the world and you're seeing that all over this country in Web sites of charitable organizations that are crashing because of the overwhelming desire on the part of ordinary people to help out.

Richard Norton Smith