If we could let go of our faith in money, who knows what we might put in its place?

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.

Health is the greatest strength.

Music in movies is all about dissonance and consonance, tension and release.

Don't worry he tells me tenderly. It doesn't matter who you've been, who you are, or who you become. I'm with you every step of the way.

Insist that the first question each of us asks isn't "What's good for me?" but "What's good for the country my children will inherit?

That world is growing in this minute.

If a problem can be solved it will be. If it can not be solved there is no use worrying about it.

I still believe that at any time the no-talent police will come and arrest me.

At some point, the pride has to be a part of the whole day-to-day oeuvre. It's part of who you are and doesn't need to be discussed anymore.

Political statements are usually more direct, and it works with the upbeat music as well, for some reason, the directness of your statements.

Philosophy for me is essentially atheistic. Now that's an anxious atheism. It's an atheism that is anxious because it inhabits questions that were resolved religiously in the pre-modern period.