When we talk about the foreign, the question becomes one of us versus them. But in the end, is one just the opposite side of the other?

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.

Believe and begin now.

When Internet parlance finds its way into our accepted vocabulary, it becomes a cliché.

Indochina gets into your blood and once you have a taste you'll find it's impossible to stay away.

Mother is the dead heart of the family spending father's earnings on consumer goods to enhance the environment in which he eats, sleeps, and watches the television.

I have very curly hair and I straighten it every day - it takes maybe two minutes. I can't imagine anyone having a bigger challenge than I do in the kinkiness that is my crazy 'fro.'

O Polly, you might have toyed and kissed, by keeping men off, you keep them on.

Intellectual ''work'' is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward.

And he realized... that fragile, mortal life wasn't just important to him. It was more important than his own.

To feel the soul without explaining it, without vocabulary, and to represent this sensation.