The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.

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.

A politician . . . one that would circumvent God.

I have learned so much from India: for instance, the use of aloe vera, which I use, and I find it sad when I see certain arts of oiling slowly fading away.

You must have something new in a landscape as well as something old, something that's dying and something that's being born.

You might be locked in a world not of your own making, her eyes said, but you still have a claim on how it is shaped. You still have responsibilities.

To inherit property is not to be born - it is to be still-born, rather.

I've made so many mistakes and I always thought I'd have time to correct them!

The revolutionary artist does not only focus on the negative aspects of capitalist lives, but also creates visions of a revolutionary future.

Nico was gothic, but she was Mary Shelley gothic to everyone else's Hammer horror film gothic. They both did Frankenstein, but Nico's was real.

Nobody can read Freud without realizing that he was the scientific equivalent of another nuisance, George Bernard Shaw.

An intellectual hate is the worst.