For the most part our leaders are merely following out in front; they do but marshal us the way that we are going.

Freedom of speech and freedom of action are meaningless without freedom to think. And there is no freedom of thought without doubt.

Authors are magpies, echoing each other's words and seizing avidly on anything that glitters.

The mere abhorrence of vice is not a virtue at all.

The civilized man has a moral obligation to be skeptical, to demand the credentials of all statements that claim to be facts.

Lying is an indispensable part of making life tolerable.

That is the essence of a witch-hunt, that any questioning of the evidence or the procedures in itself constitutes proof of complicity.

An honorable man will not be bullied by a hypothesis.

There is no necessary connection between the desire to lead and the ability to lead, and even less the ability to lead somewhere that will be to the advantage of the led.

Leadership is more likely to be assumed by the aggressive than by the able, and those who scramble to the top are more often motivated by their own inner torments.

Words are one of our chief means of adjusting to all the situations of life. The better control we have over words, the more successful our adjustment is likely to be.

...I don't just wish you rain, Beloved - I wish you the beauty of storms...

Marriage is like a long conversation that always ends too soon.

Beauty and love pass, I know... Oh, there's sadness, too. I suppose all great happiness is a little sad. Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses-

Love can give you such happiness, then can break the very heart it filled, leaving a hole that can never be fixed or protected by any armour.

Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature.

During the 1990s, San Francisco lived through one of the most intense economic booms of its history

I have a utilitarian approach to dressing; as long as I quite like it and it covers me up, I don't care what it is.

I mean, I hate when actors talk about how hard their job is. It's ridiculous, because we have the best job in the world.

Cynical is a fool's word for realist.

If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture.