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Shelby Foote
Novelist and Historian
Shelby Foote: I think it means a lot of ugly things. I think it means being absolutely certain the whole world wants to live the way you live, that the American bathroom is the answer to everybody's dream and all that kind of thing, American values. The American Dream is a nightmare sometimes. There are things that happen in this country that are just unbelievable. If the American Dream is Columbine High School, you know, I don't know what the American Dream is. By dream, I guess they usually mean good things, and there are plenty of them. No matter how you might feel about the American bathroom, as I talk about it, it is a very comfortable place. And Americans, we have less poverty and starvation than most countries have. We have better medical attention, I suppose, than most countries have. But the American thing is -- the big thing in American life appears to be money, and there are good reasons for wanting to be rich. One of them is you can get privacy. Another one is you can get good medical attention. The time to be really rich is when you're dying, so you can afford a comfortable bed and a good doctor. It's a spooky business.
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Ernest Gaines
A Lesson Before Dying
I could probably name 50 guys my age -- who would be my age now had they lived -- who were destroyed in their 20s and their 30s and their 40s because of the world they lived in. Violence, death by gunshots or a knife or heart attacks or whatever, strokes because of the kind of stress they had to live under. They did not have my chance. So I'm only a chronicler. Who am I to write about some things, certain things? Yeah, I went from picking the potatoes and picking the cotton to winning all these awards and getting paid for my stories and my books I made, and the films and all that sort of thing, but I think about the others as well, the ones who never had a chance, and what I received just cannot possibly make up for what they've lost. It cannot possibly make up for it. And I realize that not all of us are going to have what I have, but how can we -- how can the world -- make it easier, so that these young men don't wish for death at 20 and 30 years old, take any chance at 20 or 30 years old, or even their teens, because they don't care, because they don't see any future in their lives? If we can get a world like that, fix a world like that, make a world like that, then I think that would be the ideal American Dream, but I don't know if that's going to happen in our time.
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Bill Gates
Co-Founder and Chairman, Microsoft Corporation
Bill Gates: I think the American Dream is kind of a global dream now, that young people can come up with new ideas and create companies that make a contribution, not just jobs, but whatever their innovations that they bring about. Capitalism is this unbelievable open system that if you combine it with good infrastructure, good education, the creativity that we find for people who have had those chances is always going to surprise us. It's always going to come up with new seeds, new medicines, new software, new movies, things that make the world a better place.
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