New quotes

We are given our place in time as we are given our eyes: weak, strong, clear, squinting, the thing is not ours to choose. Well, this has been a squinting, walleyed time to be born in.

For the average American freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more.

Although Americans justify their self-interest in moral terms, their true interest is never itself moral.

Of course his dust would be absorbed in other living things and to that degree at least he would exist again, though it was plain enough that the specific combination which was he would never exist...

How hungrily we read about ourselves!

Life will be wonderful when men no longer fear dying. When the last superstitions are thrown out and we meet death with the same equanimity as life. No longer will children's minds be twisted by evil...

There is something about the state putting the power to bully into the hands of subnormal, sadistic apes that makes my blood boil.

Nothing human is finally calculable; even to ourselves we are strange.

Ideally, of course, a relationship is best, but then how many people are capable of deep feeling? Practically none.

Never offend an enemy in a small way.

The malady of civilized man is his knowledge of death. The good artist, like the wise man, addresses himself to life and invests with his private vision the deeds and thoughts of men. The creation of...

If one starts with the anatomical difference, which even a patriarchal Viennese novelist was able to see was destiny, then one begins to understand why men and women don't get on very well within...

We affect one another quite enough merely by existing. Whenever the stars cross, or is it comets? fragments pass briefly from one orbit to another. On rare occasions there is total collision, but most...

Traitors who prevail are patriots; usurpers who succeed are divine emperors.

a writer must always tell the truth {unless he's a journalist}

To a born-again atheist like myself, it is clear that each of us has multiple selves, talents, perceptions. But to the Roman Catholic, unity is all.

Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!

I have always regarded as a stroke of good fortune that I was not born or brought up in a small American town; they may be the backbone of the nation, but they are also the backbone of ignorance,...

{Professor} Frank recalled my idle remark some years ago: 'Never pass up the opportunity to have sex or appear on television.' Advice I would never give today in the age of AIDS and its television...

Little Bush says we are at war, but we are not at war because to beat war Congress has to vote for it. He says we are at war on terror

Actually, there is no such thing as a homosexual person, any more than there is such a thing as a heterosexual person. The words are adjectives describing sexual acts, not people. The sexual acts are...

Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.

How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.

It startled him even more when just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute's Prize for Extreme Cleverness he got lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realized that...

I commend you on your skepticism, but even the skeptical mind must be prepared to accept the unacceptable when there is no alternative. If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at...

He's spending a year dead for tax reasons.

You're a jerk,' repeated the alien, 'a complete asshole.

Deep in the fundamental heart of mind and Universe there is a reason.

The hotel shop only had two decent books, and I'd written both of them

He had got himself a life. Now he had to find a purpose in it.