Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.

The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.

Khomeini has offered us the opportunity to regain our frail religion ... faith in the power of words.

There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.

Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.

America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.

I was thinking that surgeons had to be the happiest people on earth. To cut people up and get paid for it-that's happiness, I told myself.

Love asks us that we be a little braver than is comfortable, a little more generous, a little more flexible. It means living on the edge more than we care to.

Reaching consensus in a group is often confused with finding the right answer.

Success in politics is the art of the timely lie.

Our memories have voices, too. Often sad ones that clamor like raised arms in the dark.

You cannot be born and you cannot die. You will exist in a universe that goes on forever. That is the ultimate horror from the Zen point of view. You could be unhappy forever.

Where a man can live, he can also live well.

Dressage is when you put a dress on your horse. It's like putting on drag, but for horses.

The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control - 'indoctrination,' we might say - exercised through the mass media.

My Grandmother wouldn't even speak the word Democrat if there were children in the room, she'd say Bastards instead.

Design always has a purpose, art has no purpose. That's really the difference between them. Do I think one is better than the other? Absolutely not. I think they both fulfill functions.

There has not been any great talent without an element of madness. -Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae fuit

Romanian-Yiddish cooking has killed more Jews than Hitler