The Plot Against America Quotes

“--nor had I understood til then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others”
― Philip Roth, The Plot Against America

“And as Lindbergh's election couldn't have made clearer to me, the unfolding of the unforeseen was everything. Turned wrong way round, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as "History," harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.”
― Philip Roth, The Plot Against America

“Anything can happen to anyone, but it usually doesn't. Except when it does.”
― Philip Roth, The Plot Against America

“It's so heartbreaking, violence, when it's in a house-like seeing the clothes in a tree after an explosion. You may be prepared to see death but not the clothes in the tree.”
― Philip Roth, The Plot Against America

“There were two types of strong men: those like Uncle Monty and Abe Steinheim, remorseless about their making money, and those like my father, ruthlessly obedient to their idea of fair play.”
― Philip Roth, The Plot Against America

“And how long will the American people stand for this treachery perpetrated by their elected president? How long will Americans remain asleep while their cherished Constitution is torn to shreds”
― Philip Roth, The Plot Against America

“You had to be there to see what it looked like. They live in a dream, and we live in a nightmare.”
― Philip Roth, The Plot Against America

“I was still too much of a fledgling with people to understand that, in the long run, nobody is a picnic and that I was no picnic myself.”
― Philip Roth, The Plot Against America

“To have enslaved America with this hocuspocus! To have captured the mind of the world's greatest nation without uttering a single word of truth! Oh, the pleasure we must be affording the most malevolent man on earth!

Philip Roth (2004-09-06T16:00:00+00:00). The plot against America (Kindle Locations 4887-4888). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.”
― Philip Roth, The Plot Against America

“The pompous son of a bitch knows everythingit's too bad he doesn't know anything else.”
― Philip Roth, The Plot Against America

“If anybody asks, 'Can you do this job? Can you handle it?' you tell 'em 'Absolutely.' By the time they find out that you can't, you'll have already learned, and the job'll be yours. And who knows, it might just turn out to be the opportunity of a lifetime.”
― Philip Roth, The Plot Against America

“He'd tell us that in a democracy, keeping abreast of current events was a citizen's most important duty and that you could never start too early to be informed about the news of the day.”
― Philip Roth, The Plot Against America

“War with Canada was far less of an enigma to me than what Aunt Evelyn was going to use for a toilet during the night”
― Philip Roth, The Plot Against America

“Others? He dares to call us others? He’s the other. The one who looks most American—and he’s the one who is least American! The man is unfit. He shouldn’t be there. He shouldn’t be there, and it’s as simple as that!”
― Philip Roth, The Plot Against America

“But how will I get out?" And all at once the door was open--and there was Seldon and behind him his mother. "How'd you do that?" I said. "I opened the door," he said. "But how?" He shrugged. "I pushed. I just pushed. It was open all the time." And that was when I began to bawl and Mrs. Wishnow took me in her arms and said, "That's okay. Things like this happen. They can happen to anyone.”
― Philip Roth, The Plot Against America

“...I realized that my father, of all these men, was the most obstinate, helplessly bonded to his better instincts and their excessive demands. I only then understood that he had quit his job not merely because he was fearful of what awaited us down the line should we agree like the others to be relocated, but because, for better or worse, when he was bullied by superior forces that he deemed corrupt it was his nature not to yield--in this instance, to resist either running away to Canada, as my mother urged our doing, or bowing to a government directive that was patently unjust. There were two types of strong men: those like Uncle Monty And Abe Steinheim, remorseless about their making money, and those like my father, ruthlessly obedient to their idea of fair play.”
― Philip Roth, The Plot Against America

“But why did you go,” my mother asked him, “when it was bound to upset you like this?” “I went,” he told her, “because every day I ask myself the same question: How can this be happening in America? How can people like these be in charge of our country? If I didn’t see it with my own eyes, I’d think I was having a hallucination.”
― Philip Roth, The Plot Against America

“I am not impressed by the White House!” my father cried, hammering on the table to shut her up after she’d said “the White House” for the fifteenth time. “I am only impressed by who lives there. And the person who lives there is a Nazi.”
― Philip Roth, The Plot Against America

“How can people like these be in charge of our country? If I didn’t see it with my own eyes, I’d think I was having a hallucination.” Though”
― Philip Roth, The Plot Against America

“And how long will the American people stand for this treachery perpetrated by their elected president? How long will Americans remain asleep while their cherished Constitution is torn to shreds?”
― Philip Roth, The Plot Against America

“Son, anything can happen to anyone," my father told me, "but it usually doesn't.”
― Philip Roth, The Plot Against America

“They recruited the most supple and athletic of the cops to train as mounted policemen, and a small kid could be mesmerized just watching one who’d been lazing majestically down the street stop to write a parking ticket and then lean way over in the saddle so as to place the ticket under the car’s windshield wiper, a physical gesture, if ever there was one, of magnificent condescension to the machine age.”
― Philip Roth, The Plot Against America

“Before that night, I’d had no idea my father was so well suited for wreaking havoc or equipped to make that lightning-quick transformation from sanity to lunacy that is indispensable in enacting the unbridled urge to destroy.”
― Philip Roth, The Plot Against America

“Remorse, predictably, was the form taken by her distress, the merciless whipping that is self-condemnation, as if in times as bizarre as these there were a right way and a wrong way that would have been clear to somebody else, as if in confronting such predicaments the hand of stupidity is ever far from guiding anyone.”
― Philip Roth, The Plot Against America

“And who's next, Mr. and Mrs. America, now that the Bill of Rights is no longer the law of the land and the racial haters are running the show”
― Philip Roth, The Plot Against America

“How can this be happening in America? How can people like these be in charge of our country? If I didn’t see it with my own eyes, I’d think I was having a hallucination.”
― Philip Roth, The Plot Against America

“After nearly two years of never knowing whether to believe the worst, of trying to focus on the demands of their day-to-day lives and then helplessly absorbing every rumor about what the government had in store for them, of never being able to justify either their alarm or their composure with hard fact—after so much perplexity, they were so ripe for delusion that, when the parents gathered on their beach chairs to chat together in the alleyways at night, the guessing game that invariably started up could go on without letup for hours: Who would be vice president on the Winchell ticket?”
― Philip Roth, The Plot Against America

“men worked fifty, sixty, even seventy or more hours a week; the women worked all the time, with little assistance from labor-saving devices, washing laundry, ironing shirts, mending socks, turning collars, sewing on buttons, mothproofing woolens, polishing furniture, sweeping and washing floors, washing windows, cleaning sinks, tubs, toilets, and stoves, vacuuming rugs, nursing the sick, shopping for food, cooking meals, feeding relatives, tidying closets and drawers, overseeing paint jobs and household repairs, arranging for religious observances, paying bills and keeping the family’s books while simultaneously attending to their children’s health, clothing, cleanliness, schooling, nutrition, conduct, birthdays, discipline, and morale.”
― Philip Roth, The Plot Against America

“The fear was everywhere, the look was everywhere, in the eyes of our protectors especially, the look that comes in the split second after you have locked the door and realize you don’t have the key. We had never before observed the adults all helplessly thinking the same thoughts. The strongest among them did their best to be calm and brave and to sound realistic when they told us that our worries would soon be over and the regular round of life restored, but when they turned on the news they were devastated by the speed with which everything dreadful was happening.”
― Philip Roth, The Plot Against America

“The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.”
― Philip Roth, The Plot Against America