"Given lesser opportunities, Kissinger would have done very well as a talk show host. Fortunately for him, although not so fortunately for the United States, he found his patron in Nelson Rockefeller instead of William Paley."

"The world goes on as before, and it turns out that nobody else seems to to notice the unbearable lightness of being."

"The rich, like well brought up children, are meant to be seen, not heard."

"Once having proclaimed our loyalty to the abstract idea that all men are created equal, we do everything in our power to prove ourselves unequal. Among the world's peoples, none other belongs to so many clubs, associations, committees and secret societies."

"The playing field is more sacred than the stock exchange, more blessed than Capital Hill or the vaults of Fort Knox. The diamond and the gridiron - and, to a lesser degree, the court, the rink, the track, and the ring - embody the American dream of Eden."

"The pose of innocence is as mandatory as the ability to eat banquet food and endure the scourging of the press."

"As a child growing up in the precincts of wealth, and later as a college student, newspaper reporter and resident of New York's Upper East Side, I got used to listening to the talk of financial killings and sexual misalliance that animates the conversation of the rich and the familiars of the rich."

"At this late stage in the history of American capitalism I'm not sure I know how much testimony still needs to be presented to establish the relation between profit and theft."

"The state of perpetual emptiness is, of course, very good for business."

"Most American cities shop to their best advantage when seen from a height or from a distance, at a point where the ugliness of the buildings dissolves into the beauty of an abstraction."

"I sometimes think that the American story is the one about the reading of the will."

"By the word "liberty" they meant liberty for property, not liberty for persons."

"Seeking the invisible through the imagery of the visible, the Americans never can get quite all the way to the end of the American dream."

"Nobody wants to say, at least not for publication, that we live in a society that cares as much about the humanities as it cares about the color of the rain in Tashkent."

"Never in the history of the world have so many people been so rich; never in the history off the world have so many of those same people felt themselves so poor."

"It isn't money itself that causes the trouble, but the use of money as votive offering and pagan ornament."

"That’s what’s remarkable about our current circumstances: the poverty of our imagination. We haven’t had a new political idea in 50 years. And the reason is that we talk about money, instead of about ideas, or feeling or emotion. Reading this book Dawn of Everything gives me reason to feel that men at one time had the imagination to create a future fit for human beings, instead of a future fit for machines, which is what we’ve got going now. I mean, the belief in money, like the belief in technology, in and of itself, is a revolution in the direction of the world made by and for machines. We have to figure out a way to make a future fit for human beings. And that is the problem that we’re confronting at the moment. And the more that we look for the answer in money, the less likely we are to find it."

"Money ennobles rich people, and corrupts poor people. Money in sufficient quantity entitles its possessor to the reverence and respect owed to the statue of George Washington. Money is the sacred elephant, always in the room, never to be addressed or seen, but whose will is done on earth as it is in Heaven."

"His purpose is therapeutic. A man at play with the freedoms of his mind, believing that it is allegiance to the truth and not the flag that rescues the citizens of a democracy from the prisons of their selfishness and greed, Twain aims to blow away with a blast of laughter the pestilent hospitality tents of a society making itself sick with its consumption of “sweet-smelling, sugar-coated lies.”"

"Happily, at least for the moment, the society is rich enough to afford the staging of the fiction of democracy as a means of quieting the suspicions of a potentially riotous mob with the telling of a fairy tale. The rising cost of the production — the pointless nominating conventions decorated with 15,000 journalists as backdrop for the 150,000 balloons - reflects the ever-increasing rarity of the demonstrable fact. The country is being asked to vote in November for television commercials because only in the fanciful time-zone of a television commercial can the American democracy still be said to exist."

"Good intentions, like mother’s milk, are a perishable commodity. As wealth accumulates, men decay, and sooner or later an aristocracy that once might have aspired to an ideal of wisdom and virtue goes rancid in the sun, becomes an oligarchy distinguished by a character that Aristotle likened to that of “the prosperous fool”—its members so besotted by their faith in money that “they therefore imagine there is nothing that it cannot buy.”"

"Democracy unleashes the State in the name of the people."

"As long as rulers are above the law, citizens have the same type of freedom that slaves had on days when their masters chose not to beat them."

"Bogus fears can produce real servitude."

"Instead of revealing the “will of the people,” election results are often only a one-day snapshot of transient mass delusions."

"Rather than a democracy, we increasingly have an elective dictatorship. People are merely permitted to choose who will violate the laws and the Constitution."

"People have been taught to expect far more from government than from freedom."

"There are no harmless political lies about a war. The more such lies citizens tolerate, the more wars they will get."

"We need a constitutional amendment to make the federal government obey the Constitution."

"The arrogance of power is the best hope for the survival of freedom."

"Truth is a lagging indicator in politics."

"In the long run, people have more to fear from governments than from terrorists. Terrorists come and go, but power-hungry politicians will always be with us."

"Citizens should distrust politicians who distrust freedom."

"A lie that is accepted by a sufficient number of ignorant voters becomes a political truth."

"It is impossible to destroy all alleged enemies of freedom everywhere without also destroying freedom in the United States."

"Killing foreigners is no substitute for protecting Americans."

"There is no technological magic bullet that will make the government as smart as it is powerful."

"The worse government fails, the less privacy citizens supposedly deserve."

"The Patriot Act treats every citizen like a suspected terrorist and every federal agent like a proven angel."

"Nothing happened on 9/11 that made the federal government more trustworthy."

"The better that people understand what Clinton did in office, the greater the nation's chances for political recovery."

"The principle of government supremacy is Clinton's clearest legacy."

"For scores of millions of Americans, Clinton's "caring" was more important than his lying."

"Clinton exploited and expanded the dictatorial potential of the U.S. presidency."

"Trusting government nowadays means dividing humanity into two classes: those who can be trusted with power to run other people’s lives, and those who cannot even be trusted to run their own lives."

"The growth of government is like the spread of a dense jungle, and the average citizen can hack through less of it every year."

"The surest effect of exalting government is to make it easier for some people to drag others down."

"So much of political philosophy throughout history has consisted of concocting reasons why people have a duty to be tame animals in politicians’ cages."

"The Night Watchman State has been replaced by Highway Robber States – governments in which no asset, no contract, no domain is safe from the fleeting whim of politicians."

"Paternalism is a desperate gamble that lying politicians will honestly care for those who fall under their power."