Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I am glad my life is coming to an end. To think that it might last another five hundred years, now that would be terrible, in my case.
The American high school graduate is two years behind his English, French or German counterpart; in Alabama, God knows how far behind.
Miss Rand now tells us that what we have thought was right is really wrong. The lesson should have read: One for one and none for all.
Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
In character, as it were, the writer settles for an impression of what happened rather than creating the sense of the thing happening.
One of the most fascinating aspects of politician-watching is trying to determine to what extent any politician believes what he says.
I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place
Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.
I’m exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.
To speak today of a famous novelist is like speaking of a famous cabinetmaker or speedboat designer. Adjective is inappropriate to noun.
I write in different styles because I hear different voices in my head. It would be boring to have always the same voice, point of view.
I'm exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.
I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place.
The individual's desire to dominate his environment is not a desirable trait in a society which every day grows more and more confining.
"Terrorism" is a metaphor, it's an abstract noun. It's like having a war on dandruff. It's something from advertising, it's meaningless.
You know, I've been around the ruling class all my life, and I've been quite aware of their total contempt for the people of the country.
It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.
On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.
As for civil liberties, any one who is not vigilant may one day find himself living, if not in a police state, at least in a police city.
I have been asked whether I wish to nominate a successor, an inheritor, a dauphin or delfino. I have decided to name Christopher Hitchens.
The worst thing to happen to Lincoln - aside from the unfortunate incident at Ford's theatre - was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.
The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.
No reform ever came from the bottom, and it was always people who understood how the ruling class worked who turned out to be the reformers.
The United States is my subject, but as Hawthorne once wrote, "the United States are suited for many admirable purposes, but not to live in."
anyone who sings about love and harmony and life [john lennon] is dangerous to someone who sings about death and killing and subduing [Nixon]
Persuading the people to vote against their own best interests has been the awesome genius of the American political elite from the beginning.
The first grown-up book that I read on my own was a nineteenth-century edition of 'Tales from Livy' that I'd found in my grandfather's library.
My family helped start [this country], we've been in political life ... since the 1690s, and I have a very possessive sense about this country.
The New York Times is the worst in that hardly anybody can write English over there. Most of it reads like slight translations from the German.
Obama just came swiftly out of nowhere, which was a relief to those of us who care about the Republic, and at first he seemed a very good thing.
I was raised in the Washington household of my grandfather Senator Thomas P. Gore of Oklahoma, and have known politicians intimately all my life.
If [drugs] didn't exist, our government would have to invent them, the better to enact laws aimed at keeping the citizens "sinless and obedient."
I am an obsessive rewriter, doing one draft and then another and another, usually five. In a way, I have nothing to say, but a great deal to add.
I suppose that one is always tempted to challenge those who think that they and they alone possess the truth or the way or the key to the mystery.
Country is run by... financial powers & corporate interests [who] send their lawyers to Congress to make laws so that they don't have to pay taxes
I suspect that our own faith in psychiatry will seem as touchingly quaint to the future as our grandparents' belief in phrenology seems now to us.
Rome ... at its most decadent, had never thought of hiring an actor to go through the motions of being an emperor while the Praetorian Guard ruled.
To a born-again atheist like myself, it is clear that each of us has multiple selves, talents, perceptions. But to the Roman Catholic, unity is all.
Great critics do not explicate a text; they describe it and then report on what they have described, if the description itself is not the criticism.
I'm in favor of any form of sexual relationship that gives pleasure to those involved. And I have never heard a convincing argument to the contrary.
Freud did some serious damage to American literature - a lot of writers began therapy in the 1940s, after which they all became terribly egocentric.
To a man, ornithologists are tall, slender, and bearded so that they can stand motionless for hours, imitating kindly trees, as they watch for birds.
My father had a deep and lifelong contempt for politicians in general ("They tell lies," he used to say with wonder, "even when they don't have to").
People in my situation get to read about themselves whether they want to or not. It's generally wrong. Or oversimplified - which is sometimes useful.
Since we have literally targeted our enemies, the Pentagon assumes that, sooner or later, rogues will take out our cities, presumably from spaceships.
I am told the Cheney-Bush team dislikes their junta being compared to the Nazis. If they ceased behaving like Nazis, no comparison would come to mind.
Altruism is a brief phase through which some adolescents must pass. It is rather like acne. Happily, as with acne, only a few are permanently scarred.
Like most readers, I tend to skip the acknowledgements at the beginnings of books: the 'To-My-Wife-Without-Whose-Invaluable-Assistance' kind of thing.
Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!
U.S. certainly are not warlike. We don't want that. We want to make money, which I always thought was one of the most admirable things about Americans.