Peter Benchley Quotes
The fish was an enemy. It had come upon the community and killed two men, a woman, and a child. The people of Amity would demand the death of the fish. They would need to see it dead before they could feel secure enough to resume their normal lives.
Benchley, Peter. Jaws. Doubleday, 1974.
In the closest call to murder in the Senate, Stuart Foote of Mississippi drew a pistol and aimed it at Benton in the heat of a debate:. Foote reconsidered and was overpowered on the Senate floor and was disarmed. There was no disciplinary action taken however. During slavery debates guns in the Congress were so common that Vice President Martin Van Buren once presided over the Senate for two weeks with a loaded pistol in each pocket.
Cunningham was part of an American Diplomatic Delegation negotiating with the Vietnamese. He had been an Naval Ace Fighter Pilot during the Vietnam War. He was notorious for his lack of tact.
In early America, the political parties had their own newspapers where “truth” was not an important journalistic virtue. Red scares and other fears of foreign conspiracies are as old as our nation. In 1798 the Federalists accused Vice President Thomas Jefferson, among others, of being in contact with the foreign conspirators and printed details of a "manufactured" plot to massacre the citizens of Philadelphia in one of their controlled newspapers. The nation was so alarmed that the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts were passed by Congress a few months later. These were probably the greatest infringements on American civil liberties in our history.
Peter Bradford Benchley was an American author, screenwriter, and ocean activist. He is known as the author of the bestselling novel Jaws and co-wrote its film adaptation with Carl Gottlieb. Several more of his works were also adapted for both cinema and television, including The Deep, The Island, Beast, and White Shark.
