To ask a satirist to be in Good Taste is like asking a love poet to be less personal.
~ Philip Roth via The Atlantic

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It was no accident that President Nixon took it into his head a few years ago to tart up the White House police staff in the imperial garb of junkers out of The Student Prince. He knows better than anybody how much he needs to be surrounded by all the trappings of dignified authority—or, as it turned out, authoritarian dignity.
~ Philip Roth via The Atlantic

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H. L. Mencken seemed to think it was inevitable that American democracy would produce as leaders clowns and charlatans who, along with their other disabilities, couldn’t speak English. He considered what they said and the way they said it entertainment, rivaled only by Barnum and Bailey. It took an Orwell—and a Second World War, and savage totalitarian dictatorships in Germany and Russia—to make us realize that this comical rhetoric could be turned into an instrument of political tyranny.
~ Philip Roth via The Atlantic

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If you look at the ways in which American Presidents such as Jackson, Polk, Taylor, Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, and McKinley were ridiculed in the daily papers in the nineteenth century, you’d have to conclude that both editors and readers were a heartier bunch a hundred years ago, far less intimidated than they appear to be today by pious Emily Postish notions of “respectability.”
~ Philip Roth via The Atlantic

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It’s unlikely that in reading even the very best satiric works of another era we feel anything like the glee or the outrage experienced by a contemporary audience.
~ Philip Roth via The Atlantic

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