Hugh Sidey Quotes

I went to a school with the kids of judges and elected officials and architects, civil leaders, and influencers. And I felt very much a minority in every way. But it did expose me to incredible things.

People don't find the personal lives of people with much, much more power than any celebrity would have - don't find their personal lives interesting.

I'm no wealthier than Bibi Netanyahu or Arik Sharon. I don't feel that I'm more hedonistic than Ehud Olmert, or Yitzhak Rabin or Shimon Peres.

It's horrible how money and fame can make you acceptable while, if you're not famous or rich, you're not acceptable.

I think we love watching rich people behave badly. It has a sort of grisly fascination for us.

Finally, there's a sense in which I look at this Westminster village and London intelligentsia as an outsider.

I can dine at the White House, but I can still hang at the 'hood.

In terms of the class structure that you see so much in European portraiture, I don't think one feels that in America in the 21st century. But we have these other kinds of social structures now, like celebrity, who establish new hierarchies.

Even socialist dictators have an interest in gorgeous supermodels.

If you're famous, you suck, just for being famous. People in England totally get that; Americans don't.

In New York, you've got Donald Trump, Woody Allen, a crack addict and a regular Joe, and they're all on the same subway car.

When you start hanging out with Jennifer Lopez and Bill Clinton, you can't expect to remain an everyday person.

Supermarket tabloids and celebrity gossip shows are not just innocently shallow entertainment, but a fundamental part of a much larger movement that involves apathy, greed and hierarchy.

Every year, the White House Correspondents' Dinner inspires two competing varieties of coverage: celebrity-obsessed fawning and angry tirades about how it represents everything twisted about our broken democracy. It doesn't, really.

It's passing strange that Obama, carried to a second term by women, blacks and Latinos, chooses to give away the plumiest Cabinet and White House jobs to white dudes.

But I still do believe that there are useful things to say about Elvis Presley, including what his own ordinariness as a poor Southerner says about 20th-century hero-making.

There's all this stuff that is happening in Edinburgh now, it's a sad attempt to create an Edinburgh society, similar to a London society, a highbrow literature celebrity society.

I've been in companies where they have galas. U.S. companies aren't government-funded, so they invite wealthier people to come to these events. It's a very glamorous art form. They send you off to talk to bankers, and they make you feel objectified in a way.

The chief differences among men are over means, not ends.

The mayor’s administration and staff is like the Rocky Mountains. There higher up it gets, the whiter it gets.

America's two great specialties are demagogues and rock and roll, and we've all heard plenty of both in our time.

Iron Cage

We are domesticated animals, revolving in a cage which we have built for ourselves - with its contentions, wranglings, its impossible political leaders, its gurus who exploit our self-conceit and their own with great refinement or rather crudely.

My mother, Nancy Dickerson, was a reporter for CBS and NBC and the first female star of television news; my father, Wyatt Dickerson, was a successful businessman. Their parties, from the '60s to the '80s, attracted cabinet officials, movie stars, and presidents.

There's nothing like white trash at the White House.