Phil Gramm had a stump speech ...

Phil Gramm had a stump speech about how his mother's devotion kept him from being an academic failure in life. She got him into a special school that turned him around - under a government program for the children of deceased veterans. He was repeatedly asked at press conferences why he would then turn around and support draconian cuts in federal funding for education. He never had an answer.
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 Gail Collins

Quotes from the same author

It is more a mentality than the actual places people live, as Jefferson and Hamilton would argue about - city versus country. For example, someone could have an empty place mentality yet be living in a condo in Boca Raton.
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 Gail Collins
When the women's movement started in the 1960s, there was a vision of a future where women didn't wear makeup or worry about how their hair looked, and everybody wore sensible, comfortable clothes. It ran into an absolute brick wall.
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 Gail Collins
It's possible that you have been told a time or 10 that you don't appreciate how tough your elders had it. It's true that, if you had been coming of age back in, say, 1960, you would probably be feeling more restricted, if only because you were doomed to spend your days in a skirt, nylon stockings and girdle.
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 Gail Collins
I grew up in one of the most socially conservative neighborhoods in Ohio, and my parents were traditional Catholics. But in her old age, my mother got her home health care from a guy who was gay, who was wonderful to her. Before she died, she rode a float in the Cincinnati Gay Pride Parade.
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 Gail Collins
What naturally you want to do if you were a prominent person in the public light and you are disgraced, you want to make a comeback, and normally that begins with somebody saying, I want to do something to help people. I want to do something to help the lepers in the Third World. I want to do something to help abandoned wives in India.
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 Gail Collins