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

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.

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.

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.

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

When you begin to actively participate in the creation of your life, there is never an end, even in death, for physics tells us that nothing is ever created nor destroyed, merely transformed.

I’m not sure we’re quite the monsters you want us to be.

If investments in banks fall, it is a tragedy, and people say, 'What are we going to do?' but if people die of hunger, have nothing to eat or suffer from poor health, that's nothing.

Romance is a different word than sexual contact.

I can write orchestrations, but I can't sight-read music and play at the same time. I don't have enough facility.

I don't want to weaken the Patriot Act. I want to repeal it.

Maybe if I completely shaved my head and get the frost out of my moustache, maybe I could get one of those serious acting jobs.

The photogram, or camera-less record of forms produced by light, which embodies the unique nature of the photographic process, is the real key to photography.

Los Angeles functions for me as a kind of holy template. It is postwar America.

I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity, it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one's mind.