Lionize Quotes

“About the only person we ever heard of that wasn't spoiled by being lionized was a Jew named Daniel.”

“If genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration, then as a culture we tend to lionize the one percent.”

“The American Right has an amazing ability to lionize leaders whose lives are the precise antithesis of the political values that define their image.”

“The career of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who headed the Manhattan Project, draws such questions to a focus that resembles the bead of a laser-gunsight on a victim’s breastbone. It was Oppenheimer whom the public lionized as the brains behind the bomb; who agonized about the devastation his brilliance had helped to unleash; who hoped that the very destructiveness of the new “gadget,” as the bombmakers called their invention, might make war obsolete; and whose sometime Communist fellow-traveling and opposition to the development of the hydrogen bomb — a weapon a thousand times more powerful than the bombs that incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki — brought about his political disgrace and downfall, which of course have marked him in the eyes of some as all the more heroic, a visionary persecuted by warmongering McCarthyite troglodytes. His legacy, of course, is far more complicated.”