32 Quotes by Charlie LeDuff

We are born to a time. What you do with it is on you. Do the best you can. Try to be good. And live.

People in uniform will tell you that no one life is more important than another. The lives of a white cop, a black fireman, a minister and a drug addict all have equal value. But the presumption is that if a person in uniform is killed with impunity, if such a killer is allowed to run free, then no regular citizen is safe. So for the sake of civil order, when a person in uniform is murdered, heads must get knocked, doors must be kicked in and every available cop is put to the task.

Where was the police? Where was anybody?

The people in Detroit are poor, but most of them are good. There are things going on here beyond an ordinary person’s control. These people are hungry and they have no job. No possibility of a job. They’re stuck here.

But these things are not supposed to be news. These things are supposed to be normal. And when normal things become the news, the abnormal becomes the norm. And when that happens, you might as well put a fork in it. What galleries and museums have to do.

Desperation, she said, feels like someone’s reaching down your throat and ripping out your guts.

The only difference between Detroit and the Third World in terms of corruption is Detroit don’t have no goats in the streets.

I learned that when one of them dies, the Irish comes out of the rest of them whether they are Irish or not. A firefighter is Irish by culture even if he is a black man, and there were plenty of them here. The firehouse is one of the few places in Detroit that is integrated at all. The blacks run the department, but its soul will always be Irish.

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.