Quotes from William L. O'Neill

The fabulous boom of the late 199os produced modest to no income gains for most Americans.

Bob Dylan was different. Where most folk singers were either clean-cut or homey looking, Dylan had wild long hair. He resembled a poor white dropout of questionable morals. His songs were hard-driving, powerful, intense. It was hard to be neutral about them. "The Times They Are a-Changing" was perhaps the first song to exploit the generation gap. Dylan's life was as controversial as his ideology.

As rock became less a movement and more a business, its impact, though not its popularity, declined. It seemed unlikely that rock would soon become a television staple. But some day its fans would be middle-aged, so even that possibility could not be permanently excluded.

Students saw traditional religion as a point of departure rather than a place for answers.

The most striking aspect of the "religious revival" of the 1950s, after all, had been the absence of devotion. Going to church then was more a social than a religious act. In the late sixties faith was expressed by not going to church.

Largely because of the boom, the projected deficit had shrunk to $75 billion, leading Clinton to indulge the GOP's obsessive desire to cut rich people's taxes. As always the cuts were described as tax relief for the middle class, but 68 percent went to the top i percent of taxpayers

Such a small place-with its snobbery of wealth and station, its sadistic teachers and bullying classmates, its cult of team sports, and its unremitting anti-intellectualism-becomes, for children immured in it, an entire cosmos of danger and significance

All great reforms require one to dare a lot to win a little.