32 Quotes by Charlie LeDuff

What our generation failed to learn was the nobility of work. An honest day's labor. The worthiness of the man in the white socks who would pull out a picture of his grandkids from his wallet. For us, the factory would never do. And turning away from our birthright - our grandfather in the white socks - is the thing that ruined us.

I was shown mold, leaking pipes, exposed asbestos insulation, broken toilets, cracked floors, malfunctioning heating units, feces bubbling up from the sewer pipes in the basements. I had seen better government buildings in the slums of Tijuana. Neven and the boys from 23 told me it was bad but what I was seeing was worse than the Baghdad fire department, which actually got more than one hundred fifty million dollars from the United States government, while Detroit got zero.

The city belongs to the black man. The white man was a convenient target until there were no white men left in Detroit. What used to be black and white is now gray. Whites got the suburbs and everything else. The black machine’s got the city and the black machine’s at war with itself. The spoils go to the one who understands that.

In Detroit, we all talked the race game. It is a way of life.

But wanderlust is like a pretty girl - you wake up one morning, find she's grown old and decide that either you're going to commit your life or you're going to walk away.

As for Congress, one imaginative polling firm found that brussels sprouts, head lice, cockroaches, colonoscopies, and gonorrhea were more popular than our elected representatives. Apparently, the American people realized that when you take it up the ass from a proctologist, at least it's for your own well-being. From Congress, not so much

I am a reporter, a leech, a merchant of misery. Bad things are good for us reporters. We are body collectors of sorts.

And it is awful here, there is no other way to say it. But I believe that Detroit is America’s city. It was the vanguard of our way up, just as it is the vanguard of our way down. And one hopes the vanguard of our way up again. Detroit is Pax Americana...America’s way of life was built here.

Somehow, the city of promise had become a scrap yard of dreams.