"The sad truth about political saints of any given past is that nobody but a scholar will take the trouble to read the…"

"“Take it easy, Fatty, and we'll be all right,” I told him with all the assurance of a bank robber trying to explain t…"

"His clothes, he knew, were in almost ostentatious good taste—they screamed restraint and expensive lowness of key."

"“Size, power, numbers—since the beginning of time, those three have been trying to correlate with right and wrong. So…"

"That’s the big gimmick in this business—dressing it up so they can’t tell it’s the same thing they’ve been seeing sin…"

"Laws produce lawbreakers, Bernie, like hens produce eggs. Civilization has nothing to do with it."

"A man doesn’t volunteer for a hitch in hell just so he can knock off one of the devils."

"Thank you very much for your lesson, but now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to go on, please. Some of us aren’t civil s…"

"The real world. As good a name for it as any other. Carter was a mystic never and a Freudian only when the occasion s…"

"It had taken a couple of billion years to produce me. In that couple of billion years, I had millions upon millions o…"