“Nothing is predestined. The obstacles of your past can become the gateways that lead to new beginnings.”

“There is a calmness to a life lived in gratitude, a quiet joy.”

“We are all ashamed in one way or another. Who among us is not stained by the past?”

“For at the beginning of the twentieth century, the nation had been struggling to find its way. Terror had raged, a second civil war had threatened to split the nation into new feuding armies, and the inequities of industrial life had brutalized too many lives. Three men who were caught up in those traumatic times, shaped by them, found with their talents, energy, and ideals a way out of it, both for themselves and for the nation. Darrow, Billy, D.W. were all flawed - egotists, temperamental, and too often morally complacent. But as their careers and lives intersected in Los Angeles at the tail end of the first decade of the twentieth century, each in his own way helped to move America into the modern world. They were individuals willing to fight for their beliefs; and the legacy of their battles, their cultural and political brawls, remains part of our national consciousness.”

“Nothing is ever quite right, is it, after a parent dies? No matter how well things go, something always feels slightly off...”

“You never conquer a mountain. You stand on the summit a few brief minutes and then the wind blows away your footprints”

“The "trickle-down" theory: the principle that the poor, who must subsist on table scraps dropped by the rich, can best be served by giving the rich bigger meals.”