Dalton Trumbo

There are times when it may be needful for certain private rights to give way to the requirements of a larger public good.

Is it possible for anything to resist change, even a mere commodity that can be bought, buried, banned, damned, praised, or ignored for all the wrong reasons?

Johnny held a different meaning for three different wars. Its present meaning is what each reader conceives it to be, and each reader is gloriously different from every other reader, and each is also changing.

Do we scream in the night when it touches our dreams? No. We don’t dream about it because we don’t think about it; we don’t think about it because we don’t care about it. We are much more interested in law and order, so that American streets may be made safe while we transform those of Vietnam into flowing sewers of blood which we replenish each year by forcing our sons to choose between a prison cell here or a coffin there. “Every time I look at the flag, my eyes fill with tears.” Mine too.

Either the government doesn’t think them important or, in the words of a researcher for one of the national television networks, “the military itself, while sure of how many tons of bombs it has dropped, is unsure of how many legs and arms its men have lost.”

“Why should I look, it wasn’t my fault, was it?”

But exactly how many hundred or thousands of the dead-while-living does that give us? We don’t know. We don’t ask. We turn away from them; we avert the eyes, ears, nose, mouth, face.

The telephone bell was just part of a dream. It had sounded different from any other telephone bell or any other sound because it had meant death.

Only when you’re deaf you’re lonesome. You’re godforsaken.

The piano kept time with the bell and the bell with the piano and in back of it there was thick silence and a yearning to listen and lonesomeness.