James A. Michener Quotes

I am a very foolish fond old man, Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less; And, to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind.

One of the most expensive commodities a nation can have is a cheap labor force. From this a host of consequences leaped forth as inevitable. — If you get labor for almost nothing, you have no incentive to buy expensive tools and the quality of your product will lag behind that of nations who do use the best tools on the market. — If you keep your labor occupied on menial tasks that are best suited to machines, your work force never develops those skills that would earn you more income. — If you employ ten to do the work of one, none of the ten will work to maximum efficiency because each will realize that what he or she does isn’t significant. — If you don’t pay your labor good wages, how can they ever afford to buy what you make? You limit your potential market by 50 percent at least, and if every employer in the region pays the same low wages, your market can vanish altogether. — A nation’s wealth is generated when the money from wages is quickly spread around because this causes more goods to be produced, and real wealth consists in the making and interchange of goods.
And then I made the discovery: ‘Ricardo was wrong. There is no fixed quantum of money in the world, or in any nation. The rich man doesn’t suffer deprivation when labor gets a bigger share, for that larger amount means a bigger total for him.’” — Chapter VII, “Ideas”, page 257-258

"I hate to say this to a professor of history, and a very good one, but South Africa is a land cruelly wounded by its constant recollection of things past. At certain points the English did behave poorly; this is never allowed to be forgotten. At every memorial the same time-worn litany of incidents must be recited. Hatreds become enshrined as the most vital components of the national mythos, and no one is ever permitted to forget, or turn his attention to more creative tasks. I remember that day you told us what Santayana had said: "Those who forgot history are condemned to repeat it." Well, those who remember it obsessively are poisoned by it. p1149"

I am a humanist because I think humanity can, with constant moral guidance, create reasonably decent societies. I think that young people who want to understand the world can profit from the works of Plato and Socrates, the behaviour of the three Thomases, Aquinas, More and Jefferson — the austere analyses of Immanuel Kant and the political leadership of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. [The World Is My Home (1991)]

Why were these people seeking a new home coming to Israel and not to America? Where had the American dream faltered? And he saw that Israel was right; it was taking people — any people — as America had once done; so that in fifty years the bright new ideas of the world would come probably from Israel and no longer from a tired America.

As a boy I was saved from a life of ignorance by my little hometown library.
As a college student I was educated in the
stacks of the Swarthmore library. And as an adult I use libraries daily in my search for the facts and the enlightenment I use in writing my books.
In fact, I like libraries so much that I
married a librarian.

Second, after a painful gap without any king, and a furious struggle by various foreign powers to elect men favorable to them, the Seym chose a pathetic Polish incompetent, who had the good sense to die rather promptly.

[The church's] job is to provide permanent solace and spiritual leadership to the people as a whole, whatever their government at the moment, so long as it stays within the bounds of moral decency.

From the earliest days of the nation anyone with an intelligence equal to that of sparrows had realized that the peninsula ought logically to be united as one state, but historical accident had decreed that one portion be assigned to Maryland, whose citizens despised the Eastern Shore and considered it a backwater; one portion to the so-called state of Delaware, which never could find any reasonable justification for its existence; and the final portion to Virginia, which allowed its extreme southern fragment of the Eastern Shore to become the most pitiful orphan in America.

said, “The paths to God are manifold.

Always remember, John, that you and I live on a minor planet attached to a minor star, at the far edge of a minor galaxy. We live here briefly, and when we’re gone, we’re forgotten. And one day the galaxies will be gone, too. The only morality that makes sense is to do something useful with the brief time we’re allotted.

Russia, France, Germany and China. They revere their writers. America is still a frontier country that almost shudders at the idea of creative expression.

If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion, and avoid the people, you might better stay home.

A nation becomes what its young people read in their youth. Its ideals are fashioned then, its goals strongly determined.

He was reminded that men may be angels, but they are animals, too. They are driven by uncontrollable forces and only the love of other people makes it possible for them to survive. Men are lonely and are stricken in the night. They lock their jaws against themselves. They scream like animals, and even though they ridicule love and the forces of destruction, they are themselves theatres for the operation of such forces.