Frank Rich Quotes

I’m always struck by the kids who turn up in New York and LA, and places in between. Chicago. Wanting to do theater, wanting to do independent film. Wanting to break into television or radio.

One of the most persistent cultural tics of the early 21st century is Americans’ reluctance to absorb, let alone prepare for, bad news.

What was most striking about the Obama speech in Berlin was not anything he said so much as the alternative reality it fostered: many American children have never before seen huge crowds turn out abroad to wave American flags instead of burn them.

The only truly shocking thing about last Tuesday’s election is that the Democrats didn’t do far worse, or as badly as they deserved.

Anything But An Apologist for the Lefties and All of Their Causes.

While F.D.R. once told Americans that we have nothing to fear but fear itself, Mr. Ashcroft is delighted to play the part of Fear Itself, an assignment in which he lets his imagination run riot.

Feckless as it was for Bush to ask Americans to go shopping after 9/11, we all too enthusiastically followed his lead, whether we were wealthy, working-class or in between. We spent a decade feasting on easy money, don’t-pay-as-you-go consumerism and a metastasizing celebrity culture.

Americans have less and less patience for the intrusive and divisive moral scolds who thrived in the bubbles of the Clinton and Bush years.

Hollywood no longer depicts reporters in ruthless pursuit of criminals, high and low. Now they are the criminals.

The truth is that a lot of plays aren’t political at all. In American theater history, political theater has tended to crop up when there’s a crisis, a national crisis.

The cruel ambush of 9/11 supposedly ‘changed everything,’ slapping us back to reality. Yet we are constantly shocked, shocked by the foreseeable.

There’s nothing entertaining about watching goons hurl venomous slurs at congressmen like the civil rights hero John Lewis and the openly gay Barney Frank. How curious that a mob fond of likening President Obama to Hitler knows so little about history that it doesn’t recognize its own small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht.

Nationalization would likely mean wiping out the big banks’ managements and shareholders. It’s because that reckoning has mostly been avoided so far that those bankers may be the Americans in the greatest denial of all.

Nationalization, unmentionable only yesterday, has entered common usage not least because an even scarier word – depression – is next on America’s list to avoid.

The principal House sponsor (of the Defense of Marriage Act), Bob Barr of Georgia has been married three times–which raises the question of why the act doesn’t contain a three-strikes-and-you’re-out provision.

I grew up in Washington, D.C. But also loving the theater.

Of course most Americans don’t know how A.I.G. brought the world’s financial system to near-ruin or what credit-default swaps are. They may not even know what A.I.G. stands for. But Americans do make the connection between their fears about their own jobs and their broad understanding of the A.I.G. debacle.

The actor doesn’t merely command the stage, he seems to own it by divine right.

One would like to say in the aftermath of the 2008 election that everyone lived happily ever after. But the American drama, especially when it involves race, is always more complicated than that.

In that sense, when a Bush or a Gore, or whomever, goes on David Letterman, that’s the news, too.

As America knows, Obama turned down the lucrative career path guaranteed to the first African-American president of The Harvard Law Review to pursue the missions of service and teaching instead. The potential rewards for our country, now that that early choice has led him into the White House, are enormous.

What are Americans still buying? Big Macs,Campbell’s soup,Hershey’s chocolate and Spam–the four food groups of the apocalypse.

For a man who purports to have learned of media ethics only this month, Mr. Williams has spent an undue amount of time appearing as a media ethicist on both CNN and the cable news networks of NBC.

In the bubble decade, making money as an end in itself boomed as a calling among students at elite universities like Harvard, siphoning off gifted undergraduates who might otherwise have been scientists, teachers, doctors, entrepreneurs, artists or inventors.

Yul Brynner’s performance in “The King and I,” . . . can no longer be regarded as a feat of acting or even endurance. After 30-odd . . . Mr Brynner is, quite simply, The King.

When something really comes from the soul, I think it has a truth that you cannot find in politics.

If Obama needs to be criticized, I will criticize him. There’s a tremendous amount of excitement about him. And a corollary of that is, as we’re learning, from newspapers and magazines that are going into overdrive reprinting Obama editions, etc.

Unless and until Barack Obama addresses the full depth of Americans’ anger with his full arsenal of policy smarts and political gifts, his presidency and, worse, our economy will be paralyzed.

It is kind of tedious after a while, to parse politicians doing the same thing over and over again. The facts change from week to week, but the sort of masquerade doesn’t.

The most wonderful street in the universe is Broadway. It is a world within itself. High and low, rich and poor, pass along at a rate peculiar to New York, and positively bewildering to a stranger.