New York City has more trees (2,400,000) than houses, and it makes 18,200,000 telephone calls a day of which about 125,000 are wrong numbers. Its rat… - John Gunther

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New York City has more trees (2,400,000) than houses, and it makes 18,200,000 telephone calls a day of which about 125,000 are wrong numbers. Its rate of divorces is the lowest of any big American city, less than a tenth of that of Baltimore for instance, and even less than that in the surrounding countryside. One of its hotels, built largely over railway tracks, has an assessed valuation of $22,500,000 (there are 124 buildings valued at more than a million dollars in Manhattan alone), and it is probably the only city in the world that still maintains sheriff's juries and has five district attorneys. New York City has such admirable institutions as New School for Social Research, the Council on Foreign Relations, Cooper Union, the Museum of Modern Art, and a black market in illegitimate babies. It has 492 playgrounds, more than 11,000 restaurants, 2,800 churches, and the largest store in the world, Macy's, which wrote 40,328,836 sales checks in 1944, and serves more than 150,000 customers a day. It has the Great White Way, bad manners, 33,000 schoolteachers (average pay $3,803) and 500 boy gangs.

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About John Gunther

John Gunther (August 30, 1901 – May 29, 1970) was an American journalist and author. His success came primarily by a series of popular sociopolitical works, known as the "Inside" books (1936–1972), including the best-selling Inside U.S.A. in 1947. However, he is now best known for his memoir Death Be Not Proud, on the death of his beloved teenage son, Johnny Gunther, from a brain tumor.

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The threat of Italian naval power in the Mediterranean, the dangerous entrenchment given Germany near Gibraltar as a result of the Spanish civil war, the riotous instalibility in Palestine, above all the Munich "peace" in September, 1938, and its consequences, gravely weakened British prestige, British power too, all over the world, as we well know. As a friend of mine said: "The lion tried to show his teeth, and it was all bridgework." In fact some teeth were still there. Mr. Chamberlain preferred to smile instead of biting- but he may have to bite before too long.

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To a supreme degree Roosevelt had five qualifications for statesmanship: (a) courage; (b) patience, and an infinitely subtle sense of timing; (c) the capacity to see the very great in the very small, to relate the infinitesimal particular to the all-embracing general; (d) idealism, and a sense of fixed objectives; (e) the ability to give resolution to the minds of men. Also he had plenty of bad qualities- dilatoriness, two-sidedness (some critics would say plain dishonesty), pettiness in some personal relationships, inability to say No, love of improvisation, garrulousness, amateurism, and what has been called "cheerful vindictiveness." Amateurism?- in a particular way, yes. But do not forget that he was the most masterfully expert practical politician ever to function in this republic.

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