The mythology of freedom under capitalism for the average person is a con job.

"Here's your first problem," he said, pointing at a sentence. "'Religion is the opium of the people.' Well, I don't know about people, but I think you'll find that the opium of pirates is actual...

But Octavia was a nice person with a big, generous heart who felt sorry for outsiders and tried to help them. And people like her never get any thanks for their selflessness. They are not the ones...

Oh, she breathed. How silly I've been. How silly we've all been, said another of the wives. We shouldn't be fighting each other. Our problems don't lie in any of the relationships we have with each...

There was a problem: No one cared about human rights anymore, not at home or abroad. They cared about growth — hoped for and celebrated in all the newspapers, invoked by zealous bureaucrats in every...

Some daughter of one of the gentry planters, perhaps? Those girls had the domestic virtues. But - he was comfortable enough with his good servants at Fairfield House. His yearnings had little relation...

Think of the future, she whispers. Jumbled images in primary colours. White and red swastika flags waving in the wind; gleaming rockets flying into the air; skyscrapers rise above the Danube, the...

Being a woman, in this world, ultimately makes you crazy.

... After you have done everything to please a man and he's taken his pleasure with you, all you are for him is a whore, and a whore's daughter.

Maybe that is why in my comedy I try and puncture the hypocrisy all around us, why it is almost a crusade with me to strip life down to what really is true.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye Who cheer when soldier lads march by, Sneak home and pray you'll never know The hell where youth and laughter go.

Priests cheapjack merchants selling paradise

Usually when people talk about the trickle-down theory, it has to do with economics. The richer people at the top of a society become, supposedly, the more wealth there is to trickle down to the...

..Moloch who entered my soul early. Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body. Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy. Moloch whom I abandon. Wake up in Moloch.. Light streaming...

You assume that it has to be a male god who finds a human female attractive? How sexist is that?

Human beings shouldn't have to enter such doors, shouldn't have to stay behind them. No moon ever entered there, no stars, no anything at all. They were worse than the grave, for in the grave is an...

People deal with their shadow side in a number of ways, the most common way being to find outside enemies and point to them, demonizing them and blaming them for long lists of perceived evils. This...

Puritanism, wrote H.L. Mencken, whose lifetime spanned the first progressive era, is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, might be happy.

You know, I think the main purpose of the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps is to get poor Americans into clean, pressed, unpatched clothes, so rich Americans can stand to look at them.

Once any tyranny becomes accepted as ordinary, according to Veronica, its victory is assured.

Mendel hated motorists. Give a man a car of his own and he leaves humility and common sense behind him in the garage.

But by this time I was acutely conscious of the gap between law and justice. I knew that the letter of the law was not as important as who held the power in any real-life situation.

He saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other.