The role we can play every day, if we try, is to take the whole experience of every day and shape it to involve American man. It is our job to interest him in his community and to give his ideas the excitement they should have.
I have now taken a serious task upon myself and I fear a greater one that is in the power of any man to perform in the given time-but it is too late to go back.
Sir Hugh Greene is the man I hold most responsible for the state of our country today. For 11 years hardly a week went by without a sniping reference to me. And he gave access to anyone who was prepared to say anything morally subversive.
Thus was the King and the Lord of glory judged by man's judgment, when manifest in flesh: far be it from any of his ministers to expect better treatment.
Whoever tramples on the plea for justice temperately made in the name of peace only outrages peace and kills something fine in the heart of man which God put there when we got our manhood.
The thing you've got to watch for is going broke when you're old. Look at all the people that go down and out at the finish. The man who built my country place is blind now and penniless. That's terrible!
Then about 1951 I began writing again, painfully, a novel I called in the beginning A Life Sentence on Earth, but which developed into The Tree of Man.
