Herman Melville Quotes
It is the easiest thing in the world for a man to look as if he had a great secret in him.
Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. Harper & Brothers, 1851, p. 381.
The Senator was one of the few Americans who knew that we were trying to develop and atomic weapon. One of the political problems was spending the huge sums of money that were necessary without the purpose becoming public. In a private meeting, President Roosevelt asked the Senator if he would help the administration hide $2 billion from public view. And that was the origin of the huge federal atomic laboratories at Oak Ridge, TN. This may have been the biggest piece of pork in American History and yet the Senator could never tell anyone that he had obtained it for his state.
Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. Among his best-known works are Moby-Dick (1851), Typee (1846), a romanticized account of his experiences in Polynesia, and Billy Budd, Sailor, a posthumously published novella. Although his reputation was not high at the time of his death, the centennial of his birth in 1919 was the starting point of a Melville revival and Moby-Dick grew to be considered one of the great American novels.
