"There's a therapeutic aspect to all making, but the nature of working is to compress, condense, and shape stuff, not to just expunge it. It's not just an exorcism."

"A manifesto, a diary, a crumpled suicide note, and a still relevant love letter."

"What Franz Kafka was to the first half of the 20th century, Philip K. Dick is to the second half."

"Oil-for-food shows the need for reform. There was fraud, corruption, mismanagement. I come as an advocate of a strong United Nations. If you believe in reform, it’s going to be very hard if the guy leading the charge is stained."

"A troop surge in Baghdad would put more American troops at risk to address a problem that is not a military problem."

"The big 3 networks don't like the fact that there's a Rush Limbaugh out there, they don't like the fact that there's a Fox News, they don't like the fact that there's a Matt Drudge. They liked it when it was nice, when it was just the three of them. Well, it ain't that way anymore."

"I admire Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly a lot because I think they're standup guys."

"They're responsible for the problem [of cultural meanness]."

"I consider myself to be an old-fashioned liberal. I'm a liberal the way liberals used to be when they were like John F. Kennedy and when they were like Hubert Humphrey. When they were upbeat and enthusiastic and mainstream. I am not a liberal the way liberals are today at least as exemplified by Al Franken and Michael Moore, where they're angry, nasty, closed minded, & not mainstream, but fringe."

"It doesn't happen that way."

"This is the essence of the problem. To Dan Rather and to a lot of other powerful members of the chattering class, that which is right of center is conservative. That which is left of center is middle of the road. No wonder they can't recognize their own bias."

"The family unit is the institution for the systematic production of mental illness."

"The Eskimos live among ice all their lives but have no single word for ice."

"The omelet called “race” has no existence outside the statistical frying- pan in which it has been reduced by the heat of the anthropological imagination."

"[C]ircumcision, an archaic ritual mutilation that has no justification whatever and no place in a civilized society."

"The world is so full of wonderful things we should all, if we were taught how to appreciate it, be far richer than kings."

"Bigotry and science can have no communication with each other, for science begins where bigotry and absolute certainty end. The scientist believes in proof without certainty, the bigot in certainty without proof. Let us never forget that tyranny most often springs from a fanatical faith in the absoluteness of one’s beliefs."

"The ability to play is one of the principal criteria of mental health."

"And we begin to understand that the goal of life is to die young — as late as possible!"

"Among both the Northern and Eastern Hamites are to be found some of the most beautiful types of humanity."

"You can't serve the public good without the truth as a bottom line."

"We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal."

"The lowest form of popular culture—lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives—has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage."

"The greatest felony in the news business today is to be behind, or to miss a big story. So speed and quantity substitute for thoroughness and quality, for accuracy and context. The pressure to compete, the fear somebody else will make the splash first, creates a frenzied environment in which a blizzard of information is presented and serious questions may not be raised."

"The failures of the press have contributed immensely to the emergence of a talk-show nation, in which public discourse is reduced to ranting and raving and posturing. We now have a mainstream press whose news agenda is increasingly influenced by this netherworld."

"The reality is that the media are probably the most powerful of all our institutions today and they, or rather we [journalists], too often are squandering our power and ignoring our obligations. The consequence of our abdication of responsibility is the ugly spectacle of idiot culture!"

"Nine-eleven was an act of war. The villains aren’t the terrorists. The villains live in the White House."

"After turning on his country by helping to free a domestic terrorist (Linda Evans), Nadler would later turn on his own people again by supporting President Obama’s dealing with Iran. This was despite the regime’s desire to wipe Israel off the map."

"the people of Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn had a representative utterly morally bankrupt and unfit to represent them."

"Although Nadler now claims an alliance with the “Me Too” Movement, he was one of Bill Clinton’s staunchest defenders during the impeachment process that was made possible only by Clinton’s serial abuse of women."

"Jerrold Nadler: I don't see how you can pick up someone in New York and say that his rights are different or less because he's accused of being an enemy combatant, based on whatever information, as opposed to his being accused of being a murderer. Bradford Berenson: [W]e need to be clear about what that means. It means that if we had captured Mohammed Atta on September 10th, we would have had no choice but to treat him as a criminal defendant, which would have meant no interrogation, no intelligence, and the World Trade Center is coming down. Jerrold Nadler: That's exactly right."

"[On 2006 Israel-Lebanese war] "..the net result is you have an Israeli government in disarray and a United States administration so identified with Israeli failure right now that it hurts the United States around the world.""

"There is just no sensible, logical reason why we would not make use of stem cell research."

"I had a special project to do a campaign for a Philadelphia politician named Arlen Spector [sic]. “When do I get to see Arlen Spector?” I asked. “You don’t.” Spector was a district attorney in Philadelphia, running for mayor. He wanted New York advertising but he had placed through a Philadelphia agency. I complained about not being able to see Arlen Spector. “Are you crazy?” his people said. “Nobody gets to meet Arlen Spector. We can’t even see him.” “All right,” I said, “what’s Arlen Spector for?” “Arlen Spector is for getting elected.” “All right,” I said, “what’s Arlen Spector against?” “Arlen Spector is against losing.” I did the campaign, but Arlen Spector lost."

"I didn't want to get into a political debate with him, but my patience was running thin...My shorts were getting a little tight."

"Resolutions are flying like snowflakes around here."

"I would suggest respectfully to the president that he is not the sole decider. The decider is a shared and joint responsibility."

"We're all looking for a plan that will work. The current plan is not working, and 21,500 additional troops -- it's a snowball in July. It's not going to work."

"There ought to be a million-person march on the Mall... that can be heard in the living quarters of the White House."

"We will submit legislation to the United States Senate which will...authorize the Congress to undertake judicial review of those signing statements with the view to having the president’s acts declared unconstitutional."

"You testified this morning, in response to Senator Biden, that the most embarrassing question involved — and this is not too bad — women’s large breasts. That is a word we use all the time."

"The mingling of object and image in collage, of given fact and conscious artifice, corresponds to the illusion-producing processes of contemporary civilization. In advertisements, news stories, films, and political campaigns, lumps of unassailable data are implanted in preconceived formats in order to make the entire fabrication credible. Documents waved at hearings by Joseph McCarthy to substantiate his fictive accusations were a version of collage, as is the corpse of Lenin, inserted by Stalin into the Moscow mausoleum to authenticate his own contrived ideology. Twentieth-century fictions are rarely made up of the whole cloth, perhaps because the public has been trained to have faith in "information." Collage is the primary formula of the aesthetics of mystification developed in our time."

"The struggle to make an absolute statement in an individually conceived vocabulary accounts for the profound tensions inherent in the best modern work."

"Exhibitions of minority art are often intended to make the minority itself more aware of its collective experience. Reinforcing the common memory of miseries and triumphs will, it is expected, strengthen the unity of the group and its determination to achieve a better future. But emphasizing shared experience as opposed to the artist's consciousness of self (which includes his personal and unshared experience of masterpieces) brings to the fore the tension in the individual artist between being an artist and being a minority artist."

"For the artist, fulfillment of self consists not in marching in the ranks of the liberators but in being entered in the roll of the Masters. The artist tends to find himself in the position of a deserter from his social group — or, at best, one who collaborates, with secret reservations."

"Not only were the minds of artists formed by the university; in the same mold were formed those of the art historians, the critics, the curators, and the collectors by whom their work was evaluated. With the rise of Conceptual art, the classroom announced its final triumph over the studio."

"Not only the artist but everyone "becomes someone else" in becoming someone. One is thought about, thus invented. Or as Steinberg put it with memorable succinctness in his Cogito drawings, "I think, therefore Descartes is." One creates not oneself but another. Being is in the act."

"The artist is obliged to invent the self who will paint his pictures."

"Both art and the artist lack identity and define themselves only through their encounter with each other."

"How much the work of an artist owes to an art movement to which he belongs can never be determined exactly, if only because the movement derives its character from the individual creations of its members."