If you elect a matinee idol mayor, you're going to have a musical comedy administration.

I raise my stein to the builder who can remove ghettos without removing people as I hail the chef who can make omelets without breaking eggs.

When you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax.

Those who can, build. Those who can't, criticize.

If the ends don't justify the means, then what does?

Every true New Yorker believes with all his heart that when a New Yorker is tired of New York, he is tired of life.

[It is] the most hideous waterfront structure ever inflicted on a city by a combination of architectural conceit and official bad taste. the Cathedral of Asphalt.

Here the skeptic finds chaos and the believer further evidence that the hand that made us is divine.

l have no fear of change as such and, on the other hand, no liking for it merely for its own sake.

I have long since abandoned the notion that higher education is essential to either success or happiness. Hothouses of learning do not always grow anything edible.

He continued to be an infant long after he ceased to be a prodigy.

Emotions of every color create the rich work of art that is life.

knowledge depends on the mode of the knower

Simply put, the best revenge is to live an awesome life.

Time is a sandpile we run our fingers in.

I used to despair about the condition of the world, to feel a sense of hopelessness; now I find more and more that I need to focus on what I can do, however little it is, to help others.

I love animals. I love being around them.

One person's cult is another person's spiritual organization.

The Petal table is a flower that is always in bloom.

The gesture with which one generation guards the next is the movement, and the only time we see it clearly, of life itself.

I love being around people who love to do what I love to do, which is comedy.