Most American cities shop to their best advantage when seen from a height or from a distance, at a point where the ugliness of the buildings dissolves into the beauty of an abstraction.

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.

Similar to a butterfly, I've gone through a metamorphosis, been released from my dark cocoon, embraced my wings, and soared!

With every circumstance, there is grace for change.

Besides, we were fifteen, and we couldn't get our feelings to match up with our brains. So we went with our feelings.

I see humans but no humanity.

Critics play a dangerous game when they denounce the science and law EPA has used to defend clean air for more than 40 years. The American people know better.

Hiring someone to write your autobiography is like hiring someone to take a bath for you

Graveyards are filled with books that were never written, songs that were never sung, words that were never spoken, things that were never done.

I was always more interested in story songs, things with a point of view... and things that informed me.

Who is also aware of the tremendous risk involved in faith - when he nevertheless makes the leap of faith - this [is] subjectivity ... at its height.

A leader is someone whose actions have the most profound consequences on other people's lives, for better or worse, sometime forever and ever.