Charlie LeDuff Quotes & Sayings

Since its founding, Detroit has been a place of perpetual flames. Three times the city has suffered race riots and three times the city has burned to the ground. The city's flag acknowledges as much. Speramus Meliora; Resurget Cineribus: We hope for better things; it shall rise from the ashes. — Charlie LeDuff

Children are dying in this city because they're too fucking poor to keep warm. Put that in your fucking notebook.
I put it in my fucking notebook. — Charlie LeDuff

Go ahead and laugh at Detroit. Because you are laughing at yourself. — 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. — Charlie LeDuff

He don't read. You know he doesn't have a book in his office? Not a fucking book in the shelves. Ain't that some shit? (Adolph Mongo speaking of Kwame Kilpatrick) — Charlie LeDuff

He understood that everybody's somebody to someone. He — Charlie LeDuff

Desperation, she said, feels like someone's reaching down your throat and ripping out your guts. — Charlie LeDuff

New York is a glamorous city, constituted mostly of nobodies. They crave the lights, and if they tell you differently, they're lying. Only dreamers come to New York. As a matter of course, few people have control of their lives. You live at the whim of your boss, your landlord, your grocer, the stranger, the judge, the bus driver, the mayor who won't let you smoke. On the other hand, you live at the whim of your whims, and that is the most exciting thing there is. — Charlie LeDuff

There's not much a newspaper reporter can do about dead men. But a newspaper reporter and a cop and a judge can deliver some justice. That's why the founding fathers wrote it up the way they did, I suppose. Life. Liberty. Pursuit of happiness. Everyone is entitled to those things. — Charlie LeDuff

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

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. — Charlie LeDuff

He called himself her pimp, except for the fact, he said, that he didn't like standing in the night air. — Charlie LeDuff

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. — Charlie LeDuff

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. — Charlie LeDuff

Somehow, the city of promise had become a scrap yard of dreams. But fighters do what they do best when they've — Charlie LeDuff

An earthmover was there, but instead of placing a casket into the ground, it was taking one out.
They're removing the dead. Taking him to the suburbs.
White flight. Black flight. Now dead flight. — Charlie LeDuff

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. — Charlie LeDuff

Where was the police? Where was anybody? — Charlie LeDuff

Oh yeah? Go fuck yourself.
He hung up.
I called back ten minutes later, thinking it was an appropriate amount of time to have gone and fucked oneself. — Charlie LeDuff

And then I settled into the most natural thing for a man with no real talents.
Journalism. — Charlie LeDuff

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. — Charlie LeDuff

If we were poets, we'd starve on words. — Charlie LeDuff

That ideal had become as ossified as the statue of Benjamin Franklin up there. From New York to Los Angeles, American newspapers were yellow and stale before they even came off the press. Dog-beaten by a dwindling readership, financial losses and partisan attacks, editors had stripped them of their personality in an attempt to offend no one. And so there was no more reason to read them. Safety before Truth. Grammar over Guts. Winners before Losers. My eyes traveled down from Franklin to the iron sconces above the entrance. — Charlie LeDuff

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. — Charlie LeDuff

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

Some people are doomed from birth because their environment is so toxic. — Charlie LeDuff

At the end of the day, the Detroiter may be the most important American there is because no one knows better than he that we're all standing at the edge of the shaft. — 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. — Charlie LeDuff