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Judah Folkman
Cancer Research
There's a freedom to pursue ideas and jobs and kinds of work that fit you, that you like to do, freedom to express yourself, to write. It's not freedom from responsibility, but most places in the world you're told what you can't do, by the government, by the police, I mean, very few places like this country. And even in places like in Europe, great countries in Europe, after five o'clock, it's not so good to be working past five. It's frowned on. You are told, "That's not the way we do it here." There's a style. So there's enormous freedom here to do -- that just doesn't exist in other parts of the world. And I think that's what's so great about this country.
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Judah Folkman
Cancer Research
A few minutes ago I was taking a cab to the airport, and there was a Russian cabdriver who had been here only two and a half years, so he's just barely speaking English, but he had four cell phones going, all pasted on his dashboard, and they were ringing, and he was answering them. He was dispatching, and he was driving, and I said, "What are you doing here?" He said, "Well, I own a cab company. I have four other Russians working for me, and we do not make enough money. We make money, but we don't make enough money to rent a place to have a dispatcher." So he's the dispatcher. So he was saying -- I can't remember his words -- saying, "What a country!" Because he could never have done this where he was. And he was about 30, and he was working 18 hours a day. It's amazing.
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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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