Claude Chabrol Quotes
I remember an article, I can't recall who by, it was after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which said that now the Wall was down, there could be no more class war. Only someone with money could ever say such a thing.
Chabrol, Claude. Interview. Cineaste, vol. 22, no. 3, 1996, p. 24.
The United States money was then on the Gold Standard. The country was growing and needed more money in circulation. But most of the gold that might be available was in England and English bankers could control much of the U. S. economy. The Populists and the Democrats wanted us to use silver to back U. S. money as there was plenty of silver in the United States. The Republicans would not relent and depression was upon the country. A half century later, it would be Republican President Richard M. Nixon, who took the United States off the gold standard. Lease was far ahead of her time.
Abrams originated this famous phrase which many have been used subsequently for various “socialized” government benefits that were available to the rich but not the poor. He was referring to the fact that at the time, the government provided housing assistance to the rich by having federally insured mortgages and granting tax deductions for the interest in home mortgages, but there was no assistance to the poor who could only afford to rent and had no tax deductions nor was there any federal public housing assistance. During the Great Recession the phrase was often used when the government gave bail out money to General Motors and the largest banks who were close to bankruptcy, but the landscaping gardener or the hot dog vendor whose business was falling because of the recession were told that is the capitalist system—there are some winners and some losers. The government officials who advocated the bailout did not disagree about the fairness and appropriateness of the Abrams phrase but if they had not bailed the banks out, the entire economic system of the country would probably have collapsed and the ensuing depression would hurt the average worker and the poor even more. Related to the recent “too big to fail” concept.
Claude Henri Jean Chabrol was a French film director and a member of the French New Wave (nouvelle vague) group of filmmakers who first came to prominence at the end of the 1950s. Like his colleagues and contemporaries Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette, Chabrol was a critic for the influential film magazine Cahiers du cinéma before beginning his career as a film maker.
