"The fact that black voters have voted over 90 percent Democratic for decades leaves them almost wholly without power. Democrats—paradigmatically, the Clintons—feint in their direction during general elections, trying to assure turnout and using them to bash Republicans as bigots and—in the usual fashion—as emblems of their own goodness."

"There's no reason for Republicans to waste any time on black voters; there are no votes there under any conditions. Rand Paul went to Ferguson and Baltimore to talk racial healing: no one cared or even noticed."

"Randolph Bourne has not been forgotten, not completely. People are still reading his work. They're still talking about his ideas and about his memorable phrases. The most famous of these has gradually become so widely quoted in our culture that millions of people have heard it, even heard it repeatedly, without ever learning who originally wrote or said it: "War is the health of the State.""

"The work that's being done 24/7 at Antiwar.com not only honors Randolph Bourne's contribution to the libertarian tradition; it also helps to assure that that tradition will continue and grow."

"His byline was particularly familiar to readers of The New Republic—until his radically antiwar views on the eve of the US government's intervention in World War I got him fired."

"[Republicans in Hess's youth] represented the only strong anti-imperalist political position. Anti-imperialist? Republicans? Uh-huh. But Republicans were not smart enough to call it that. They let it be labeled isolationism, as though they wanted the United States to sneak off the world stage, slam the doors, and bolt the windows. The underlying Republican argument, that we should trade with everyone but not interfere with or intervene in their internal politics, was lost behind that unattractive label."

"[Professor Jennifer] Burns doesn't seem to understand that when leftists, or conservatives or liberals for that matter, refer to capitalism, they don't mean what Ayn Rand meant by it. They mean the system that is otherwise known as mercantilism, corporatism, state capitalism, or even fascism—a system in which huge corporations, aided by the state, dominate a heavily-regulated and centrally-directed economy. This is what both conservatives and liberals advocate, this is what the New Left opposed. One New Left guru, the late Murray Bookchin, told me thirty years ago in Boston that he had no quarrel with what Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard meant by the term capitalism, a system in which people divide their labour, specialise in producing certain goods and services, and trade among themselves. Bookchin told me that he would say that that is not capitalism, though there are many different definitions."

"The most imaginative people are the most credulous, for them everything is possible."

"A soft refusal is not always taken, but a rude one is immediately believed."

"Psychiatry's chief contribution to philosophy is the discovery that the toilet is the seat of the soul."

"More and more people care about religious tolerance as fewer and fewer Care about religion."

"To the average cigarette ]]smoker]] the world is his ashtray."

"Music has charms to soothe a savage breast — but not the unmusical one."

"The movie actor, like the sacred king of primitive tribes, is a god in captivity."

"To remain young one must change. The perpetual campus hero is not a young man but an old boy."

"One who understands much displays a greater simplicity of character than one who understands little."

"Gods are born and die, but the atom endures."

"When a machine begins to run without human aid, it is time to scrap it - whether it be a factory or a government."

"To attempt suicide is a criminal offense. Any man who, of his own will, tries to escape the treadmill to which the rest of us feel chained incites our envy, and therefore our fury. We do not suffer him to go unpunished."

"Without the spice of guilt, sin cannot be fully savored"

"Apart from his comment on the propensity of people to follow where their leader beckons, even when for a change he may actually be taking them where they ought to go, his book includes these comments, none of them very cheering"

"All generalizations are false, including this one."

"The pavement ritual showed the industry's diurnal business face, all hustle and press agents and shaking hands, with the selected star brought down from studio Olympus (or at least the Hollywood Hills) before a public audience in broad daylight, a scene which recalls Alexander Chase's observation that "the movie actor, like the sacred king of primitive tribes, is a god in captivity"."

"When Alexander Chase wrote, "To understand is to forgive, even oneself," he summarized much of what has been learned about forgiveness through the ages. Forgiveness requires at least a bit of understanding, sometimes quite a bit."

"Walking in space, man has never looked more puny or more significant."

"The peak of tolerance is most readily achieved by those who are not burdened with convictions."

"There are few successful adults who were not at first successful children."

"Memory is the thing you forget with."

"The banalities of a great man pass for wit."

"For the unhappy man death is the commutation of a sentence of life imprisonment."

"The rich man may never get into heaven, but the pauper is already serving his time in hell."

"Lovers of air travel find it exhilarating to hang poised between the illusion of immortality and the fact of death."

"People, like sheep, tend to follow a leader - occasionally in the right direction."

"The rich man may never get into heaven, but the pauper is already serving his term in hell."

"Frank Sinatra stopped his car. The light was red. Pedestrians passed quickly across his windshield but, as usual, one did not. It was a girl in her twenties. She remained at the curb staring at him. Through the corner of his left eye he could see her, and he knew, because it happens almost every day, that she was thinking, It looks like him, but is it? Just before the light turned green, Sinatra turned toward her, looked directly into her eyes waiting for the reaction he knew would come. It came and he smiled. She smiled and he was gone."

"It no longer matters what song he is singing, or who wrote the words — they are all his words, his sentiments, they are chapters from the lyrical novel of his life."

"They stopped at The Sahara, taking a long table near the back, and listened to a baldheaded little comedian named , who is probably more caustic than any comic in the country. His humor is so rude, in such bad taste, that it offends no one — it is too offensive to be offensive."

"When Sinatra sits to dine, his trusted friends are close; and no matter where he is, no matter how elegant the place may be, there is something of the neighborhood showing because Sinatra, no matter how far he has come, is still something of the boy from the neighborhood — only now he can take his neighborhood with him."

"He never knows whether they want him for what he can do for them now — or will do for them later."

"He is what in traditional Sicily have long been called uomini rispettati — men of respect: men who are both majestic and humble, men who are loved by all and are very generous by nature, men whose hands are kissed as they walk from village to village, men who would personally go out of their way to redress a wrong."

"All the Way; All or Nothing at All. This is the Sicilian in Sinatra; he permits his friends, if they wish to remain that, none of the easy Anglo-Saxon outs. But if they remain loyal, then there is nothing Sinatra will not do in turn — fabulous gifts, personal kindnesses, encouragement when they're down, adulation when they're up. They are wise to remember, however, one thing. He is Sinatra. The boss. Il Padrone."

"He is a wholly unpredictable man of many moods and great dimension, a man who responds instantaneously to instinct — suddenly, dramatically, wildly he responds, and nobody can predict what will follow."

"Words that warmed women, wooed and won them, snipped the final thread of inhibition and gratified the male egos of ungrateful lovers; [...] for which they were eternally in his debt, for which they may eternally hate him."

"The whole thing had lasted only about three minutes. And three minutes after it was over, Frank Sinatra had probably forgotten about it for the rest of his life — as Ellison will probably remember it for the rest of his life: he had had, as hundreds of others before him, at an unexpected moment between darkness and dawn, a scene with Sinatra."

"Sinatra brings out the best and worst in people."

"One way to hold a woman is not to hold her."

"You should be proud of your profession because there's less lying in journalism than in any other profession. They lie in education, they lie in politics, they lie in banking, they lie in labor; there's liars all over the place. Sports? Full of liars. And there are liars in journalism, but if there are liars, journalism will out them."

"Sinatra with a cold is Picasso without paint, without fuel — only worse."

"Sometimes it's good to be an outsider, especially as a journalist."

"If you're a child of store owners, if you're brought up in a store, you learn good manners. You have to be genial, well-liked. You're not going to sell a customer if you're rude. You also get with different age groups, and different types of people. So be respectful. Being respectful is very important. You have to learn this."