"Americans are broad-minded people. They'll accept the fact that a person can be an alcoholic, a dope fiend, a wife beater, and even a newspaperman, but if a man doesn't drive, there is something wrong with him." ~Art Buchwald, "How Un-American Can You Get?," Have I Ever Lied to You?, 1966.
Art Buchwald passed away Wednesday at age 81.
Thanks for this. I wasn't a huge fan, but that alone deserves kudos.
ReplyDeleteExcellent quotation; wish it weren't so true.
ReplyDeleteExcellent find quote. Thanks for finding this. Here's what another great columnist, the late Herb Caen, wrote about the plague of cars in our cities:
ReplyDelete"And then to the rarest treasure, Golden Gate Park on a car-free Sunday morning, the air wet and clean, the meadows green with the promise of spring. Not a single automobile: The silence is deafening, you can actually hear the branches dripping moisture, squirrels scrambling through the underbrush -- and the birds! Hundreds of redbreasted robins bobbing across the lawns, now that there are no cars to frighten them. On Stanyan, the families are renting bikes and heading into the winding trails.
"Slowly it dawns on them that they can use the main drive and the roads. For once the world does not belong to the automobile. The bicycle is king again and the rider may go where fancy dictates without looking nervously over his shoulder. You are even allowed, for a few unrealistic minutes, to reflect on how pleasant life would be if the car were banned from San Francisco."