To bring into the world an unwanted human being is as antisocial an act as murder.
In a nation that has developed to a high art advertising, the creator who refuses to advertise himself is immediately suspected of having no product worth selling.
I think the Chinese will say the hell with you and pull their money out of the United States. That’s the end of our wars.
The word ‘radical’ derives from the Latin word for root. Therefore, if you want to get to the root of anything you must be radical. It is no accident that the word has now been totally demonized...
You can only have a war with another country. You can’t have a war with bad temper or a war against paranoids.
What is a political party but a conspiracy?
I do not admire ‘the people,’ as such. No one really does. Their folk wisdom is usually false, their instincts predatory. Even their sense of survival – so highly developed in the individual – goes berserk in the mass. A crowd is a fool.
The true confessors have been aware that not only is life mostly failure, but that in one’s failure or pettiness or wrongness exists the living drama of the self.
American laws don’t work, but at least the laws of physics might work.
To a born-again atheist like myself, it is clear that each of us has multiple selves, talents, perceptions. But to the Roman Catholic, unity is all.
It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.
Write something, even if it’s just a suicide note.
Since nothing is free, to each his price.
Now you have people in Washington who have no interest in the country at all. They’re interested in their companies, their corporations grabbing Caspian oil.
The worst thing to happen to Lincoln – aside from the unfortunate incident at Ford’s theatre – was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.
When you are brought up in a zoo, you know what’s going on in the monkey house. You see a couple of monkeys loose and one is President and one is Vice President, you know it’s trouble. Monkeys make trouble.
Traitors who prevail are patriots; usurpers who succeed are divine emperors.
I’d like to see a revival of state legislatures, in which I am a true Jeffersonian.
Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age.
To a man, ornithologists are tall, slender, and bearded so that they can stand motionless for hours, imitating kindly trees, as they watch for birds.