Love of country follows from the exercise of its freedoms, not from pride in its fleets or its armies.

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.

The most successful people I've worked with, like the Rolling Stones - people of a different, kind of legendary caliber - have such great, warm energy.

Ever since I was a kid I've always loved history. I think that kind of catapulted things, but I would say the two major factors were maybe 9/11 and the election of Barack Obama.

My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly contrary of a mission.

Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory it too good.

Turn your midlife crisis to your own advantage by making it a time for renewal of your body and mind, rather than stand by helplessly and watch them decline.

I am quite prepared to die here [in NY]. It doesn't matter at all. I don't know better places, or perhaps if I do I am not prepared to make a move.

Books form in us habits of thought which shall live forever with us.

I understand what my brand is. My brand is not my information. My brand is me and what I say is secondary to who I am.

It looks as if I were meant to be alone, and that any hope of happiness is not meant. Am I too old to acquire the knack for happiness?

Certainly we know from our own experience how very difficult it is when you've lost an election that perhaps a lot of people were expecting you to win.