The best defense against the terror of existence are the homely comforts of love, work, and family life, which connect us to a world that is independent of our wishes yet responsive to our needs.

Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it.

Relentless improvement of the product and upgrading of consumer tastes are the heart of mass merchandising.

It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media.

The family is a haven in a heartless world.

Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.

The attempt to redefine the family as a purely voluntary arrangement grows out of the modern delusion that people can keep all their options open all the time.

When liberals finally grasped the strength of popular feeling about the family, they cried to appropriate the rhetoric and symbolism of family values for their own purposes.

Progressive rhetoric has the effect of concealing social crisis and moral breakdown by presenting them as the birth pangs of a new order.

George Orwell's contention was that it is a sure sign of trouble when things can no longer be called by their right names and described in plain, forthright speech.

The effect of the mass media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction.

Just as faith without works is dead, so also works without faith.

The Universe mirrors you. It mirrors your thoughts, both conscious and subconscious. It mirrors your actions and reactions.

I can stand what I know. It's what I don't know that frightens me.

Stravinsky is masterly: his harmony is conceived so precisely that it can only be the way it is.

You're not a little kid anymore. You need to make friends, get out of the house, and live your life.

I think we had a Ben Webster/Gerry Mulligan record... that might have been it. We only had a few records in the house.

Kindness is not about instant gratification. More often, it's akin to a low-risk investment that appreciates steadily over time.

Men who could willingly resign the luxuries and sensual pleasures of a large fortune cannot consent to live without the grandeur and the homage.

Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.

Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them.