Unlike every other nation in the world, the United States defines itself as a hypothesis and constitutes itself as an argument.

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.

Be not afraid of life believe that life is worth living and your belief will create the fact.

Personal emotions should be carefully monitored. Emotional ties are to be exploited but never felt.

My mom still lives in Denver and some of my brothers are still in the area, so I still have strong ties there.

My father really taught me that you really develop the habit of writing and you sit down at the same time every day, you don't wait for inspiration.

The Obama foreign policy, in broad strokes, has been a disaster.

My narrators tend to be women with low self-esteem, so I can send them to charm school.

In men this blunder still you find; all think their little set mankind.

He enjoys true leisure who has time to improve his soul's estate.

A man cannot dress, but his ideas get cloath'd at the same time.

A mind forever Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.