[P]erhaps you notice how the denial is so often the preface to the justification.

The one thing that the racist can never manage is anything like discrimination: he is indiscriminate by definition.

Everything about Christianity is contained in the pathetic image of 'the flock.

What is your idea of earthly happiness? To be vindicated in my own lifetime.

How is the United States at once the most conservative and commercial AND the most revolutionary society on Earth?

I try to deny myself any illusions or delusions, and I think that this perhaps entitles me to try and deny the same to others, at least as long as they refuse to keep their fantasies to themselves.

We live only a few conscious decades, and we fret ourselves enough for several lifetimes.

Cheap booze is a false economy.

Never ask while you are doing it if what you are doing is fun. Don't introduce even your most reliably witty acquaintance as someone who will set the table on a roar.

What do you most value in your friends?Their continued existence.

th. Closely followed—in view of the overall shortage of time—by patience.

Christmas is not a story birthed of a humanized god for it simply doesn’t fit into the rubric of such an emaciated plot.

I don’t do math.

If you care too much about a person you will loose your importance in his life

Poetry takes place in time. It is a durational. Things take place in sequence.

As I said in one of my songs, we're still abolishing slavery, but nobody says it's a good thing. Nobody justifies it.

I've come too far, and I don't know how to get back.

It has been a long time since philosophers have read men's souls. It is not their task, we are told. Perhaps. But we must not be surprised if they no longer matter much to us.

It is a rare and high privilege to be in a position to help people understand the differences that they can make not only in their own lives but in the lives of others by simply giving of themselves.

Those mad at me, writing emails angrily, Im not anti-America, America is anti-me.

A thought is an arrow shot at the truth; it can hit a point, but not cover the whole target. But the archer is too well satisfied with his success to ask anything farther.