Education: All in The American Family

• Share

(2 of 2)

Chief Justice of the U.S. William Rehnquist, at Marquette University, Milwaukee: "When you are young and impecunious, society conditions you to exchange time for money, and this is quite as it should be. Very few people are hurt by having to work for a living. But as you become more affluent, it somehow is very, very difficult to reverse that process and begin trading money for time."

Physicist Freeman Dyson, at the College of Wooster, Ohio: "The game of status seeking, organized around committees, is played in roughly the same fashion in Africa, in America and in the Soviet Union. Perhaps the aptitude for this committee game is part of our genetic inheritance, like the aptitude for speech and for music."

Author Paul Theroux, at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst: "These books about the affairs of the White House, telling secrets -- they're obnoxious. But haven't we got a right to know those things? Aren't we obliged to know those things? The same goes for people selling snake oil and salvation. It's human weakness that they represent, but it's an American strength when they are exposed."

Vietnamese Boat Person Vu Thanh Thuy, at Marist College, Poughkeepsie, N.Y.: "In fact, surprising as it may seem, the daily struggle of making a living in America is more difficult to cope with than all of the events we went through in prison and at sea. The reason is that there is nothing 'heroic' about surviving the never ending problems of daily life."