To make an Army work you have to have every man in it fitted into a fear ladder... The Army functions best when you're frightened of the man above you, and contemptuous of your subordinates.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.

The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.

Khomeini has offered us the opportunity to regain our frail religion ... faith in the power of words.

There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.

Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.

America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.

I was thinking that surgeons had to be the happiest people on earth. To cut people up and get paid for it-that's happiness, I told myself.

Love asks us that we be a little braver than is comfortable, a little more generous, a little more flexible. It means living on the edge more than we care to.

Reaching consensus in a group is often confused with finding the right answer.

I can do anything a man can do except get a hard-on--and that's only because I lack the equipment.

Well, there's nothing more touching than putting a smile on a kid's face when you can.

The superior man thinks always of virtue; the common man thinks of comfort.

Often you must turn your stylus to erase, if you hope to write anything worth a second reading.

My first lessons lasted two weeks and it was Jingle Bells. It didn't make any sense at all. I wanted to know how to play like Hendrix.

I don't really know what Hollywood is. I've never really known.

Women are mere "beauties" in men's culture so that culture can be kept male. When women in culture show character, they are not desirable, as opposed to the desirable, artless ingenue.

The unsaid part is the best of every discourse.

It takes a motion to notion and it takes a notion to motion.

It's always a struggle to make things sound more or less brilliant.