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.
Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.
That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.
Our rulers for more than half a century have made sure that we are never to be told the truth about anything that our government has done to other people, not to mention our own.
Perfect love sometimes does not come until the first grandchild.
The people are not stupid, but they are totally misinformed.
I’m a born – again atheist.