The Plot Against America Quotes
"Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear."
"It was work that identified and distinguished our neighbors for me far more than religion."
"Israel didn’t yet exist, six million European Jews hadn’t yet ceased to exist, and the local relevance of distant Palestine was a mystery to me."
"Pride of ownership" was a favorite phrase of my father’s, embodying an idea real as bread to a man of his background."
"The anger that night was the real roaring forge, the furnace that takes you and twists you like steel."
"There was Roosevelt, there was the U.S. Constitution, there was the Bill of Rights, and there were the papers, America’s free press."
"Compelling attention wherever he went by turning out the likenesses people requested had seemingly no effect on the impersonal element at the core of his strength, the inborn modesty that was his toughness."
"That Americans could choose Lindbergh—that Americans could choose anybody—rather than the two-term president whose voice alone conveyed mastery over the tumult of human affairs . . . well, that was unthinkable."
"It was the unknown airmail pilot who’d dared to do what had never been done by any aviator before him, the adored Lone Eagle, boyish and unspoiled still, despite the years of phenomenal fame."
"My intention in running for the presidency," he told the raucous crowd, once they had stopped chanting his name, "is to preserve American democracy by preventing America from taking part in another world war. Your choice is simple. It’s not between Charles A. Lindbergh and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It’s between Lindbergh and war."
"It was Lindy all over again, straight-talking Lindy, who had never to look or to sound superior, who simply was superior—fearless Lindy, at once youthful and gravely mature, the rugged individualist, the legendary American man’s man who gets the impossible done by relying solely on himself."
"To prevent a war in Europe is now too late. But it is not too late to prevent America from taking part in that war. FDR is misleading the nation. America will be carried to war by a president who falsely promises peace. The choice is simple. Vote for Lindbergh or vote for war."
"The man to me is one thing only—a walking advertisement for the overthrow of capitalism."
"It is now guaranteed that this great country will take no part in the war in Europe."
"America wasn’t a fascist country and wasn’t going to be, regardless of what Alvin had predicted. There was a new president and a new Congress but each was bound to follow the law as set down in the Constitution."
"As every collector knew, no president before him had ever commissioned his postmaster general to issue so many new stamps, nor had there been another American president so intimately involved with the Post Office Department."
"The answer, of course, was yes, but Sandy appeared to have fallen into a patriotic stupor, and I took my cue from him and let silence register my awe as well."
"It isn’t like living in a normal country anymore. I’m terribly sorry, children—please forgive me."
"You know that Washington never did live in Washington. President Washington chose the site, he signed the bill making it the permanent seat of the government, but it was his successor, John Adams, who was the first president to move into the White House in 1800."
"Of course, Richmond, Virginia, was the capital of the eleven southern states that left the Union to form the Confederate States of America."
"It means turning our back on our friends. It means making friends with their enemies. You know what it means, son? It means destroying everything that America stands for."
"Their disagreement only grew more passionate during dinner, my father maintaining that Just Folks was the first step in a Lindbergh plan to separate Jewish children from their parents, to erode the solidarity of the Jewish family."
"The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic."
"Turned wrong way round, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as 'History,' harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable."
"My apprehension was at its worst when we stepped up into the bus and paid. The fare money was stolen, we were where we shouldn’t be, and where we were headed we had no idea."
"He does not glorify the state at the expense of the individual but, to the contrary, encourages entrepreneurial individualism and a free enterprise system unencumbered by interference from the federal government."
"I was lost, a lost boy—that’s what I pretended. What will I eat? Where will I sleep? Will dogs attack me? Will I be arrested and thrown in jail?"
"It was the first time I saw my father cry. A childhood milestone, when another’s tears are more unbearable than one’s own."
"This is not an evil man, not in any way. This is a man of enormous native intelligence and great probity who is rightly celebrated for his personal courage."
"And as Lindbergh’s election couldn’t have made clearer to me, the unfolding of the unforeseen was everything."
"The whole of the outside world had become a bus the way for a boy in South Dakota it was a pony—the pony that carries him to the limits of permissible flight."
"What with all of downtown strung with thousands of bulbs and the carolers singing and the Salvation Army band reveling and on every street corner another Santa Claus laughing, it was the month of the year when the heart of my birthplace was sublimely theirs and theirs alone."
"And night after night I went to sleep under the exciting spell of the great new aim I’d unearthed for my eight-year-old life: to escape it."
"This then was the culmination of our quest—Jesus Christ, who by their reasoning was everything and who by my reasoning had fucked everything up."
"You sound like Alvin, Herman. You sound like a kid. What counts besides money? Your two boys count."
"Son, anything can happen to anyone," my father told me, "but it usually doesn’t."
"The cellar was a place bereft not just of a sunny window but of every human assurance."
"And yet whenever I was headed for the cellar by myself, I took care to warn each in turn that I was on my way and to beg them to keep their distance and not to besiege me once I was in their midst."
"By then a month had passed since the awful homecoming at Penn Station and, though it wasn’t necessarily pleasant, I’d feel no revulsion to speak of when, while going for my shoes in the morning, I reached to the back of the closet for Alvin’s prosthesis and handed it across to where he was seated on the bed in his under-shorts, waiting his turn in the bathroom."
"Some things you don’t know why you do them. You just do them, you can’t not."
"There’s pain where you are, and there’s pain where you ain’t. I wonder who thought that up."
"He was sick and he was suffering and he died. Now he’s not suffering anymore."
"Never before had I had to grow up at a pace like this."
"History is everything that happens everywhere. Even here in Newark. Even here on Summit Avenue. Even what happens in his house to an ordinary man—that’ll be history too someday."
"In a democracy, keeping abreast of current events was a citizen’s most important duty and that you could never start too early to be informed about the news of the day."
"The news is Shepsie’s life, and the news is terrible, and so it affects how he thinks."
"How can this be happening in America? How can people like these be in charge of our country? If I didn’t see it with my own eyes, I’d think I was having a hallucination."
"They want to get the Jews so fed up with everything that they leave for good, and then the goyim will have this wonderful country all to themselves."
"There is still a Supreme Court in this country. There is Justice Douglas. There is Justice Frankfurter. There is Justice Murphy and Justice Black."
"I follow things, and I read things, and I know who these criminals are, son."
"Ardor, for these men, was all they had to go on."
"Do you have any idea what people are going through all over the world?"
"I only hope that in the future you're spared any real reason to cry."
"Nothing comparable has been undertaken since then to provide adventurous Americans with exciting new opportunities to expand their horizons."
"We will wind up living out there just about the way we live here. Maybe better."
"You cannot just take Jews because they're Jews and force them to live where you want them to."
"This is illegal. You cannot just take Jews because they're Jews and force them to live where you want them to."
"How could a street as modest as ours induce such rapture just because it glittered with rain?"
"How could the sidewalk’s impassable leaf-strewn lagoons and the grassy little yards oozing from the flood of the downspouts exude a smell that roused my delight as if I’d been born in a tropical rain forest?"
"And just where do they get the gall to do this to people?"
"You cannot grow up to be frightened like your parents. Promise me you won’t."
"Their being Jews didn’t issue from their being themselves, as did their being American."
"Their being Jews was as fundamental as having arteries and veins."
"To be sure, for a child in the court of Louis XIV the ambitions and satisfactions of such a relative would never have attained the same intimidating aura of significance that Aunt Evelyn’s did for me."
"How long will Americans remain asleep while their cherished Constitution is torn to shreds by the fascist fifth column of the Republican right marching under the sign of the cross and the flag?"
"I lived in Kentucky! Kentucky is one of the forty-eight states! Human beings live there like they do everywhere else!"
"I wanted nothing to do with history. I wanted to be a boy on the smallest scale possible. I wanted to be an orphan."
"I remember nothing between my stealing out of the house and starting down the empty street toward the orphanage grounds and my waking up the next day..."
"I was dumbfounded, and not only by the abrupt decline in my father’s vocational status..."
"A father remodeled, a brother restored, a mother recovered, eighteen black silk sutures stitched in my head and my greatest treasure irretrievably lost..."
"Yet not even that ironclad certainty could stop the adults from abandoning common sense and, for a night or two, imagining themselves and their children as native-born citizens of Paradise."
"Well, like it or not, Lindbergh is teaching us what it is to be Jews."
"These people are not understanding that I take this for granted, goddamnit! Others? He dares to call us others? He's the other."
"I only then understood that he had quit his job not merely because he was fearful of what awaited us down the line should we agree like the others to be relocated but because, for better or worse, when he was bullied by superior forces that he deemed corrupt it was his nature not to yield."
"I was remembering Mrs. Wishnow when what was uppermost in her mind was what was uppermost in my mother’s mind—back when she was just another watchful member of the local matriarchy whose overriding task was to establish a domestic way of life for the next generation."
"But that was long before everything else went wrong."
"The word wasn’t ‘fire.’ It was ‘fascism’ Winchell cried—and it still is. Fascism! Fascism! And I will continue crying ‘fascism’ to every crowd of Americans I can find until Herr Lindbergh’s pro-Hitler party of treason is driven from the Congress on Election Day."
"But what our homegrown Hitlerites cannot take away is my love for America and yours. My love for democracy and yours. My love for freedom and yours."
"The Hitlerite plot against America must be stopped—and stopped by you! By you, Mr. and Mrs. New York! By the voting power of the freedom-loving people of this great city on Tuesday, November 3, nineteen hundred and forty-two!"
"There is nothing Walter Winchell has more talent for than himself."
"On the day when a candidate for the presidency of the United States requires a phalanx of armed police officers and National Guardsmen to protect his right to free speech, this great country will have passed over into fascist barbarism."
"I cannot accept that the religious intolerance emanating from the White House has already so corrupted the ordinary citizen that he has lost all respect for fellow Americans of a creed or faith different from his own."
"It’s the beginning of the end of fascism in America! No Mussolini here, Cucuzza—no more Mussolini here!"
"It's so heartbreaking, violence, when it's in a house—like seeing the clothes in a tree after an explosion. You may be prepared to see death but not the clothes in the tree."
"A family, my father liked to say, is both peace and war, but this was family war as I could never have imagined it."
"What a repugnant spectacle our country has become! Falsehood, cruelty, and madness everywhere, and brute force in the wings waiting to finish us off."
"Life is not without risk, and aviation, of course, is not without risk, particularly for those like Amelia Earhart and Charles A. Lindbergh, whose daring and courage as solo aviators launched the aeronautical age in which we now live."
"Glass jaw. Phony-baloney. A going-over. A hard guy. What’s his beef? I’ll take the grunt. The oldest dodge in the world."
"All of it the result of my father’s failing to understand that Alvin’s nature was never really reformable, despite the lecturing and the hectoring love."
"Our country is at peace. Our people are at work. Our children are at school. I flew down here to remind you of that. Now I’m going back to Washington so as to keep things that way."
"And why, why did he go to fight in the first place? Why did he fight and why did he fall? Because there is a war going on, he chooses that way—the raging, rebellious instinct historically trapped!"
"How it must please the Führer to be poisoning our country with this sinister nonsense. Jewish interests. Jewish elements. Jewish usurers. Jewish retaliation. Jewish conspiracies. A Jewish war against the world."
"My fellow Americans, unlawfulness on the part of America’s law enforcement agencies cannot and will not be allowed to prevail."
"It is no longer a matter of the great American democracy taking military action to save us. The time has come for American citizens to take civil action to save themselves."
"There is not a shred of evidence that a single detainee is in any way responsible for whatever befell my husband and his plane."
"The history of the present administration is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states."
"Liberty and justice are restored, and those who have violated the Constitution of the United States shall now be addressed by the judicial branch of government, in strict keeping with the law of the land."
"To spare the country the ordeal of such a criminal prosecution against a former Acting President of the United States and to protect against the disruptive distraction of such a spectacle during a time of war."
"The fear was everywhere, the look was everywhere, in the eyes of our protectors especially, the look that comes in the split second after you have locked the door and realize you don’t have the key."
"I hadn’t understood anything of the story that was her life in those years. Till Seldon’s frantic phone call from Kentucky, I’d been unable to add that high."