Of what does politics consist except the making of imperfect decisions, many of them unjust and quite a few of them deadly?

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.

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.

You never know, until it happens, what you will owe the dead.

Thank you for stitching me up" I say."I seem to have a talent for it.

With the death of bin Laden, it's finally time for Congress to bring back the pre-9-11 legal norm, before we decided it was okay to toss out our civil liberties if the 'bad guys' were scary enough.

It would be idle, and presumptuous, to wish to imitate the achievements of a Morphy or an Alekhine; but their methods and their manner of expressing themselves are within the reach of all.

So to me it's very similar in terms of trying to distill within the image, those elements that are gonna form, hopefully, a compelling visual statement.

I don’t believe in universalism, but I do believe in Jesus Christ, the reconciler of all

Success is all very well as long as you don't inhale.

When I record an album I'm trying to get as close as possible to that perfect moment.

What is the body? That shadow of a shadow of your love, that somehow contains the entire universe.

It is in a small village in the Pyrenees where no one knows me 7that my life will come to a close.... There is not enough time remaining for me to write all the letters I would like to write.