Skepticism cannot be revolutionary, even though it speaks the language of revolution.

Despotism has so often been established in the name of liberty that experience should warn us to judge parties by their practices rather than their preachings.

Racism is the snobbery of the poor.

In a way, all sociologists are akin to Marxists because of their inclination to settle everyone's accounts but their own.

Peace is impossible, war is improbable.

In writing if it takes over 30 minutes to write the first two paragraphs select another subject.

Intellectuals cannot tolerate the chance event, the unintelligible: they have a nostalgia for the absolute, for a universally comprehensive scheme.

The intellectual who no longer feels attached to anything is not satisfied with opinion merely; he wants certainty, he wants a system. The revolution provides him with his opium.

What passes for optimism is most often the effect of an intellectual error.

Foreknowledge of the future makes it possible to manipulate both enemies and supporters.

Political thought in France is either nostalgic or Utopian.

It had only taken me six years to change from a ten-year-old to a sixteen-year-old

Oh, Williamsburg. There was a point when you seemed like a scary, tough neighborhood, but now it's obvious that the graffiti on your walls gets put there by art students.

You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming.

Fear is not the natural state of civilized people.

In a budget, how important is art versus music versus athletics versus computer programming? At the end of the day, some of those trade-offs will be made politically.

I don't do method acting. If I play a farmer I'm not gonna spend 3 weeks on a chicken farm. That's a bit too much for me.

Mr Blawke always reminded me of a heron; I'm not sure why. Something to do with a sense of rapacious stillness, perhaps, and also the aura of one who knows time is on his side.

I kinda expected to turn the bottle and see a recipe. "So that's how you make ice cubes. Apparently you just freeze this stuff. Oh, but you need a tray. That's how they trick you into it."

People like what they like. They're gonna do what they're gonna do.

Love is a kind of military service