Construed as a means instead of an end, history is the weapon with which we defend the future against the past.

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.

If he'd been any other boy, and this was any other world, I would have kissed him. Nothing could have stopped me.

1862 ...although we can judge that an act is in itself a grave offense, we must entrust judgment of persons to the justice and mercy of God.

I'm me and nobody else; and whatever people think I am or say I am, that's what I'm not, because they don't know a bloody thing about me.

Martin Luther King was a victim of surveillance, and had great solidarity with victims of surveillance.

I can't do this because I can't...I can't be the man I want to be with you. And that means that this - this just becomes...another reminder of what I am not.

I've never had to work out of the arts. I've always either been a writer or an editor, or something where I've made my living from doing what I love. You can't get any better than that.

I used photography to distance myself from a world that I loathed and was powerless to improve.

Our task is not to liberate the oppressed, but to liberate the oppressors

All natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it.

Nothing routs us but the villainy of our fears.