The world goes on as before, and it turns out that nobody else seems to to notice the unbearable lightness of being.

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.

How much I'd always envied the tight life of voles. The hidey hole was happiness.

In a world of violence

I like to believe that storytelling transcends age limitations.

I'm always interested to meet my friends' parents, or who they were raised by. Where they grew up, I always find very interesting.

I suspect there are people in all walks of life who need to be dragged into the 21st century in terms of attitudes towards women.

Honestly, my number-one motivation is my family.

A lot of times if you want to get another agent, agents actually make you do monologues in their offices. They still do that! You've got to come up with something!

In order to find balance, I feel very strongly about two things in particular in terms of routine. Work out, and eat well.

The sacraments infuse holiness into the terrain of man's humanity: they penetrate the soul and body, the femininity and masculinity of the personal subject, with the power of holiness.

I want people to be ecstatic but to cry at the same time.