I don't trust a man who uses the word evil eighteen times in ten minutes. If you're half evil, nothing soothes you more than to think the person you are opposed to is totally evil.

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.

I guess it's true what they say: if we could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people.

I will say this about being an optimist: even when things don't turn out well you are certain they will get better.

Our vulnerability to Russia or any other foreign power is directly related to how divided, partisan, dysfunctional our political process is. That's the thing that makes us vulnerable.

I would like to have you quote me, Erich von Stroheim, as having said on this day of this month of this year this one thing: you Americans are living on baby food.

One could not stay a month without loving the shabby town

I learned long ago that being Lewis Carroll was infinitely more exciting than being Alice.

What the Who is all about is exactly that and it always has been. If it exists today for this concert, it's in response again to a function which is happening out there on the street.

The state of the world, of course, is constantly changing, and so is theory.

Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite workmanship, which grinds your stuff to any degree of fineness.