Anti-utopianism continues to suffuse our culture...Today few imagine that society can be fundamentally improved, and those who do are seen as at best deluded, at worst threatening.

Leadership consists not in degrees of technique but in traits of character.

I know no other way out of what is both the maze of the eternal present and the prison of the self except with a string of words.

I never can pass by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York without thinking of it not as a gallery of living portraits but as a cemetery of tax-deductible wealth.

People may expect too much of journalism. Not only do they expect it to be entertaining, they expect it to be true.

The substitution of meaning accounts for the grasping of misers as well as the extravagance of spendthrifts. Karl Marx well understood this peculiar transformation of flesh into coin.

Dissent is what rescues democracy from a quiet death behind closed doors.

The survival of American democracy depends less on the size of its armies than on the capacity of its individual citizens to rely... on the strength of their own thought.

It isn't money itself that causes the trouble, but the use of money as votive offering and pagan ornament.

America is about class. To pretend that it isn't is very ignorant. No society has ever existed without some kind of a ruling class.

Unlike every other nation in the world, the United States defines itself as a hypothesis and constitutes itself as an argument.

When God's favour and Godly flavour is in you, your haters will taste wisdom and the only thing they can do is to regret ever tasting a sweet thing.

There are two types of stories: public and private.

I don't think he'd [Andy Warhol] be that amazed because he was so driven to be the Picasso of the second half of the 20th century.

I've shut myself inside these walls, and I'm going to be a very lonely old lady if I'm not careful.

I'm just being the artist that I would have loved if I was a child.

You can't take sides against anything. If you would just be one who is for things, you would live happily ever after. If you could just leave the "against" part out.

I've had death threats, but I've never been fearful for my life. Although I have traveled with security since the '60s.

When a man is a favorite of Fortune she never takes him unawares, and, however astonishing her favors may be, she finds him ready.

Many people thought I would never succeed, because I am so Russian. So Russian, hundred percent.

There's a lot of mediocrity being celebrated, and a lot of wonderful stuff being ignored or discouraged.