达里尔·F.柴纳克/Darryl F.Zanuck
Now that I can look back across the years from the so-called vantage point of experience in two World Wars, travel throughout a large part of the world, and contact with many of the outstanding personalities of our time, it gives me a great deal of real reassurance each day to know that way down deep I learned some fundamental values when I was a boy in a small town in Nebraska.
I have found one thing to be so very true—the virtues I learned as a boy are still fundamental virtues. My point of view has changed, of course, over the years, and so has that of my friends, but so much of all this change of viewpoint is like a small boy gazing at a hill on the plains of Nebraska. The hill remains the same. The small boy only sees it from another angle as he grows up.
I have always tried to walk completely around every hill I have found in existence since, so that I could get a view from every angle. This, I think, reveals the difference between honesty and cynicism. When you see the hill from every angle, you have a much better chance at keeping life in focus. When you only see it from one angle you run the very great danger of becoming cynical.
Two of the fundamental virtues that have been such a great comfort to me in my life, from the days of my boyhood in Wahoo, Nebraska, until now are loyalty and charity. There are other fundamentals I learned as a boy, but principally loyalty and charity.
Loyalty is not only just a term—it has been a way of life for me. I mean not only loyalty to my friends and family, but to the honest values on which our country was founded. And to me, this guidepost of loyalty of necessity means loyalty to one's own self.
When I was growing up, I rebelled against so many things, and fought against so many of the basic ideas of life—but I found after so much rebellion and walking completely around that hill on the Nebraska plains, in my mind's eye, that these virtues had not been tested over the centuries in vain.