Seeking the invisible through the imagery of the visible, the Americans never can get quite all the way to the end of the American dream.

The supply of government exceeds demand.

His administration apparently means to define itself as a television program instead of a government...I don't know if it can please both its sponsors and its intended audience.

Nobody suffers the pain of birth or the anguish of loving a child in order for presidents to make wars, for governments to feed on the substance of their people, for insurance companies to cheat the young and rob the old.

Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what's good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.

To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.

Seeking the invisible through the imagery of the visible, the Americans never can get quite all the way to the end of the American dream.