All Quotes

"There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem."

"It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, however suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true."

"One can never rely on the great keeping one's letters; and should those letters vanish, one is apt to be remembered only as the mysterious half of a dialogue to be reconstructed in the vaguest way from the surviving (and sometimes lesser!) half of the exchange."

"Books always cost more in those cities where they are least read!"

"How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself."

"...for ferocity there is nothing on Earth equal a Christian bishop hunting "heresy", as they call any opinion contrary to their own."

"The folly of the clever is always more than that of the dull."

"In a good cause hypocrisy becomes a virtue."

"Constantine was never a true Galilean; he merely used Christianity to extend his dominion over the world. He was a shrewd professional soldier, badly educated and not in the least interested in philosophy, though some perverse taste in him was hugely satisfied by doctrinal disputes; the mad haggling of bishops fascinated him."

"Vengeance must end somewhere, and what better place to stop than at the prince?"

"Constantinople has no past; only a noisy present and a splendid future, if the auguries are to be believed."

"They say to know oneself is to know all there is that is human. But of course no one can ever know himself. Nothing human is finally calculable; even to ourselves we are strange."

"It is one thing to use text to illustrate a point one is making, but quite another to quote merely to demonstrate the excellence of one's memory."

"By definition a bore is predictable. if you think you know in advance what a man is apt to say or do, you are not apt to be disagreeably surprised by him."

"...because academics everywhere are forever attacking one another, and I had long since learned that one must never believe what a teacher says of another."

"Despite all evidence to the contrary I do not believe humans innately cruel, but they fear change of any kind."

"Are we a dream in the mind of a deity, or is each of us a separate dreamer, evoking his own reality?"

"No one can tell another man is true. Truth is all around us...Truth is where ever man has glimpsed divinity."

"Modern Christianity is a encyclopedia of traditional superstition."

"His fault was a common one. He simply did not know what he was;he saw no flaw in himself, a not unusual blindness and preferable, on the whole , to being unable to find any virtue in oneself."

"The rhetoric of hate is often most effective when couched in the idiom of love."

"We are all so simple at heart that we become unfathomable to one another."

"The malice of a true Christian attempting to destroy an opponent is something unique in the world. No other religion ever considered it necessary to destroy others because they did not share the same beliefs. At worst, another man's belief might inspire amusement or contempt—the Egyptians and their animal gods, for instance. Yet those who worshipped the Bull did not try to murder those who worshipped the Snake, or to convert them by force from Snake to Bull. No evil ever entered the world quite so vividly or on such a vast scale as Christianity did."

"Men are odd. If they cannot be first, they don't in the least mind being last."

"We are all in the habit of censuring the great, as if we were popular playwrights, when in fact ordinary folk are quite as devious and as willful and as desperate to survive (if not prevail) as are thee great; particularly philosophers."

"On the throne of the world, any delusion becomes fact."

"Traitors who prevail are patriots; usurpers who succeed are divine emperors."

"There is no terror equal that of the ignorant in a strange place."

"American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither."

"Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies."

"I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults."

"First coffee, then a bowel movement. Then the Muse joins me."

"The hatred Americans have for their own government is pathological, if understandable. At one level it is simply thwarted greed: since our religion is making a buck, giving a part of that buck to any government is an act against nature."

"It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail."

"I can understand companionship. I can understand bought sex in the afternoon, but I cannot understand the love affair."

"As one gets older, litigation replaces sex."

"I am at heart a propagandist, a tremendous hater, a tiresome nag, complacently positive that there is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise."

"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."

"At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation, and prejudice."

"The more money an American accumulates the less interesting he himself becomes."

"In any case, rather like priests who have forgotten the meaning of the prayers they chant, we shall go on for quite a long time talking of books and writing books, pretending all the while not to notice that the church is empty and the parishioners have gone elsewhere to attend other gods, perhaps in silence or with new words."

"That peculiarly American religion, President-worship."

"The period of Prohibition — called the noble experiment — brought on the greatest breakdown of law and order the United States has known until today. I think there is a lesson here. Do not regulate the private morals of people. Do not tell them what they can take or not take. Because if you do, they will become angry and antisocial and they will get what they want from criminals who are able to work in perfect freedom because they have paid off the police."

"The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country — and we haven't seen them since."

"Big oil, big steel, big agriculture avoid the open marketplace. Big corporations fix prices among themselves and thus drive out of business the small entrepreneur. Also, in their conglomerate form, the huge corporations have begun to challenge the very legitimacy of the state."

"The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return ..."

"There is only one party in the United States, the Property party… and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt — until recently… and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties."

"A narcissist is someone better looking than you are."

"As the age of television progresses the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception. To be perfect for television is all a President has to be these days."

"Never pass up a chance to have sex or appear on television."