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Tom Wolfe
America's Master Novelist
Tom Wolfe: I think The American Dream is very much alive. That's why there's incredible immigration to this country. And the idea is that no matter where you start out, you have the freedom to reach the height that your ability will enable you to do that. And the New York Times has just run a long series about class in America. They don't even realize they're not talking about class, they're talking about status. I mean, when they have an article -- one of the articles was about some evangelical Christians who somehow have come into money, and they know enough to go to Ivy League colleges, and they're making inroads at Brown and so forth and so on. That's class? These people have moved up? That is just sheer status. They've improved their status through hard work. And the entire series. Class, to have real class, it was understood in Marx's day, you almost have to have a land-based economy. People have to be pretty static. And there has to be symbolism. There has to be a sense that in one class you cannot wear -- in a lower class you cannot wear what they wear in a higher class. There's a certain kind of obeisance you have to make to people who are above you. And all that is gone in this country.
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John Wooden
Basketball's Coaching Legend
John Wooden: They use the winning percentage, and that's not an accurate way of judging success. I wanted to come up with something of my own, and I think there were three things embedded into it. One was the discussion in Mr. Schidler's class. Then, my dad's words: "Never trying to better than someone else, learn from others, and never cease trying to be the best you could be." And, always being interested in verse that makes a point, about that time I ran across a little simple one that said:
At God's footstool, to confess,
A poor soul knelt and bowed his head.
"I failed," he cried. The master said,
"Thou didst thy best. That is success."
I think those things, more than anything else, accounted for my own definition. The definition I coined for success is: Peace of mind attained only through self satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to become the best of which you're capable. Now, we're all equal there. We're not all equal as far as intelligence is concerned. We're not equal as far as size. We're not all equal as far as appearance. We do not all have the same opportunities. We're not born in the same environments, but we're all absolutely equal in having the opportunity to make the most of what we have and not comparing or worrying about what others have. I coined that in 1934. Later, I started working on my pyramid. I worked on that for the next 14 years, placing success according to my definition at the apex.
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Bob Woodward
Investigative Reporter
What in my business I've found is that we basically do have a free press, that we can operate independently. But the real input comes from people who believe in a free press, believe in the First Amendment, believe in open discourse as much as possible, hate secrets, hate secret government, hate secret concentrations of power. So in an odd way, those in my business have a million allies out there. People who are basically truth-tellers, want to help somebody, know that the truth is cleansing, that the truth is a good thing, that the society needs to function on that. And that in a little way, and often in a significant way, that's realized. That we do explain enough about what's going on. I think in the atmosphere we are in now, somebody who would get up and propose some of the things that were done in Vietnam, like conducting the war when we didn't believe in it, or burglarizing, or wiretapping, or doing the abusive things of Watergate, I think it's so ingrained that there are enough people who would stand up and say, "We can't do that. We shouldn't do that." That doesn't mean there won't be more scandals and maybe even larger scandals, but in a sense, the vision or the dream of the people who wrote the Constitution has, at least in part, been realized.
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