Tennessee Williams Quotes
Some things are not forgiveable. Deliberate cruelty is not forgiveable. It is the most unforgiveable thing in my opinion, and the one thing in which I have never, ever been guilty.
Williams, Tennessee. A Streetcar Named Desire. New Directions, 1947, p. 126.
The Boers were the decedents of the original Dutch farmers who came to South Africa. They were uneducated, lower class emigrants from Holland who, unlike the British who came later and were primarily interested in trade, were farmers and wanted to acquire the rich South African land for permanent settlement with no place for the blacks who were emigrating from Central Africa to acquire the same land. The result was a conflict between the whites of South Africa—the Boers who wanted to own as much land as possible and wanted the Blacks to be their slaves or very low wage workers with no rights at all, and the English whose laws made the Blacks citizens with rights. When the English ended up controlling South Africa the Boers with their own Afrikaner language and culture felt that the English whites were selling them out. The lower class Boers were insulted that under the English law, they were no better than Black farmers. They wanted to separate from the English so they could totally dominate the Blacks and strived for independence which led to the Boer Wars. Although the Boers lost to the English, they bred and populated South Africa and eventually came to dominate it politically. It was the Boers—also called Afrikaners—who were the ones who introduced Apartheid and created the racist society that caused so much difficulty in the late 20th century.
New York Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote a piece criticizing the rationale behind the forced ouster of Times reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr., but it was never published. Stephens told colleagues the column was killed by publisher A.G. Sulzberger. Since then, the piece has circulated among Times staffers and others — and it was from one of them, not Stephens himself, that The Post obtained and published it.
Thomas Lanier Williams III, known by his pen name Tennessee Williams, was an American playwright. Along with contemporaries Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, he is considered among the three foremost playwrights of 20th-century American drama.
