Quotation for the day: Eric Sevareid

A national conference on traffic safety is going in this capital city in teh traditional American belief that if only enough people sit at enough round-shaped tables and talk enough, any problem can be solved.  The problem is there all right: the sad fact is that in these fifty-four years of driving cars more Americans have been killed by other Americans than by the armed enemies in all of America's wards.  Last year alone 38,000 were killed on the roads, which is more than our combat deaths in three years of the Korean war.  And the President has pointed to the ironic fact that while we spend billions and set up elaborate world-wide organizations to prevent war, we just pick at the fringes of this far worse manslaughter of street and highway.

Eric Sevareid, "Report from the Independent Pessimists," CBS radio broadcast 18 February 1954; printed in Eric Sevareid, Small Sounds in the Night (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956) 181-2.