Women think of being a man as a gift. It is a duty. Even making love can be a duty. A man has always got to get it up, and love isn't always enough.

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.

A house divided cannot stand.

It’s highly virtuous to say we’ll be good, but wecan’t do it all at once, and it takes a long pull, a strongpull, and a pull all together before some of us even get ourfeet set in the right way.

If speaking is silver, then listening is gold.

Suffering brings experience.

Folly growes without watering.

Princes don't come around everyday, and happy endings don't grow on trees

You can never pat yourself on the back during the season. Then you get complacent, stop working and let yourself slide.

Getting my library card was like citizenship; it was like American citizenship.

Here lies the real terror in the international war of ideologies; that a city knows not whom it entertains.

In public worship all should join. The little strings go to make up a concert, as well as the great.