Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Arresting development, attacking science, and glorifying poverty is not the answer to the vices that attend prosperity.
The praise of free men is worth having, for it is the only praise which is free from either servility or condescension.
For with all our pretension to enlightenment, are we not now a talking, desultory, rather than a meditative generation?
One of the misfortunes of our time is that in getting rid of false shame we have killed off so much real shame as well.
Some travelers collect souvenirs, postcards, or bumper stickers; I bring home a pencil from the various places I visit.
With concerted effort, I can follow written instructions, but don't ask me to simply grasp how to operate a smartphone.
[Footnote:]Each male has from 2 to 790 females with whom he discusses current events. Of these he marries from 3 to 17.
If an animal does something, we call it instinct; if we do the same thing for the same reason, we call it intelligence.
Human beings can remain spiritual and religious while enjoying the benefits of rational administration of their affairs.
I'm no stranger to a bit of sexist backlash, but I was surprised by the level of vicious and misogynist hate I received.
Politics is the diversion of trivial men who, when they succeed at it, become important in the eyes of more trivial men.
The dramatic critic who is without prejudice is on the plane with the general who does not believe in taking human life.
When critics are waiting to pounce upon poetic style on exactly the same grounds as if it were prose, the poets tremble.
In all the good Greek of Plato I lack my roastbeef and potato. A better man was Aristotle, Pulling steady on the bottle.
One of the misfortunes of our time is that in getting rid of false shame, we have killed off so much real shame as well.
Any method by which you get to see things that you haven't seen before hones your practiced ability to make connections.
The Renaissance of the fifteenth century was, in many things, great rather by what it designed then by what it achieved.
Ordinary Women was shot on a soundstage with a professional crew and a professional animation studio creating everything.
It is a mistake to expect good work from expatriates for it is not what they do that matters but what they are not doing.
All one has to do to gather a large crowd in New York is to stand on the curb a few minutes and gaze intently at the sky.
David Cronenberg is the most provocative, original, and consistently excellent North American director of his generation.
All of life is more or less what the French would call s'imposer, to be able to create one's own terms for what one does.
The advantage we have as Americans is that we can be fair; we tend to be more open-minded about different styles of wine.
When photography was invented, people had to make room in their minds for the idea that the dead would always be visible.
I don't know if memoirs can produce literary work of the first order. But I do know that novels are doing it only rarely.
Islam, or any religion, will become totalitarian if it is made into an ideology, because that is the nature of ideologies.
All people hope Islam helps everything in life. Islam will make jobs. Islam will make freedom. Islam will make everything.
I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures.
Colour can be the true main thing in art that is widely valued – even valued by the maker of the art – for other meanings.
I think the essence of [Kurt] Vonnegut's humanism lay in his emphasis on human kindness as, so to speak, our saving grace.
You must never aspire to 'finish' a house, you can merely hope to start it, and from then on it's an evolutionary process.
I don't like to boast, but I have probably skipped more poetry than any other person of my age and weight in this country.
When we come to an edge we come to a frontier that tells us that we are now about to become more than we have been before.
The blues is not the creation of a crushed-spirited people. It is the product of a forward-looking, upward-striving people.
To die quickly in one's eighth decade at the very top of one's powers is an enviable end, and not an occasion for mourning.
In the theatre, a hero is one who believes that all women are ladies, a villain one who believes that all ladies are women.
There's never one "ding-dong" moment.You never know for sure if you're doing the right thing. Things don't end all at once.
What matters are those ordinary acts of kindness and of love, not vaulting ambition with its attendant hubris and smugness.
I think of my own work as part of a decades-long conversation about books and reading with people I will mainly never meet.
If California ever developed a vineyard rating system, Saxum's James Berry Vineyard would be classified as one of the best.
Whatever you do,strive to do it so well that no man living and no man dead and no man yet to be born could do it any better.
Women, as they grow older, rely more and more on cosmetics. Men, as they grow older, rely more and more on a sense of humor.
So long as there is one pretty girl left on the stage, the professional undertakers may hold up their burial of the theater.
I sometimes lie awake at night and try to imagine what would be the best period in history to spend one's seventy-odd years.
If I ever see another Shakespeare production where somebody drives a Jeep on stage, I'm going to run screaming up the aisle.
I think that most of the best movies made in America in the 20th century were crime dramas, screwball comedies and westerns.
They [the Pilgrims] believed in freedom of thought for themselves and for all other people who believed exactly as they did.
At 83, George Bernard Shaw's mind was perhaps not quite as good as it used to be, but it was still better than anyone else's.
I know I have not always been understandable and that I was guided for too long by stubborn naivety, which created confusion.
Whatever you do, do it so well that people looking on will feel that the task was reserved especially for you by God Himself.