27 Quotes by Don Watson

I like having my own style; love my work or hate my work, it’s my own.

I ask myself, ‘Do you want to sit on the sidelines of life or do you want to be on the field?’ I suppose all those years of building thicker skin has made it easy to endure criticism.

The managerial class has forced on us a public language that makes no sense.

Michael Young, the English sociologist who coined the term “meritocracy,” despised the fashion for it: first, because it is largely a smug fantasy perpetuated by those who sit at the top of the social pyramid; and second, because it bestows on those at the bottom the slur that they are there because they have no merit. Even feudalism spared the poor that insult: their lowly station was an accident of birth.

Jargon is making it increasingly hard to understand what a public figure is actually trying to say.

Hubris is an incurable American disease. As incurable as the military-industrial machine that keeps coming up with the armaments that make wars seem like slam dunks, but which last for decades; wars that are fought by a very small percentage of the population and, regular effusive acknowledgement of veterans notwithstanding, can be ignored for years.

The strip runs forever along the Gulf Coast, and it makes you wonder why, on the night of Katrina, the Holy Comforter didn’t take the opportunity to make a more comprehensive town-planning statement.

Crockery has been withdrawn from American culture below a certain level.

Decried every day as a feckless thing without initiative or ambition, a thing not to be mentioned in the same breath as private enterprise, government became that thing. First sequester its responsibilities, sell off its functions, grant it no respect; run it into the ground and then declare it incompetent.