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.
A nation fights well in proportion to the amount of men and materials it has. And the other equation is that the individual soldier in that army is a more effective soldier the poorer his standard of living has been in the past.
A political convention is after all not a meeting of a corporation's board of directors; it is a fiesta, a carnival, a pig-rooting, horse-snorting, band-playing, voice-screaming medieval get-together of greed, practical lust, compromised idealism, career-advancement, meeting, feud, vendetta, conciliation, of rabble-rousers, fist fights (as it used to be), embraces, drunks (again as it used to be) and collective rivers of animal sweat.
Alimony is the curse of the writing classes.
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.
Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.
Booze, pot, too much sex, failure in one's private life, too much attrition, too much recognition, too little recognition. Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice.
Culture is worth a little risk.
Culture's worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we're all totalitarian beasts.
Destroy time, and chaos may be ordered.
Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen.
Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.
Growth, in some curious way, I suspect, depends on being always in motion just a little bit, one way or another.
Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.
Historical, religious, and existential treatises suggest that for some persons at some times, it is rational not to avoid physical death at all costs. Indeed the spark of humanity can maximize its essence by choosing an alternative that preserves the greatest dignity and some tranquility of mind.
I always start a book for money. If you've been married five times, you have to.
I do believe that America's deepest political sickness is that it is a self-righteous nation.
I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.
I don't trust a man who uses the word evil eighteen times in ten minutes. If you're half evil, nothing soothes you more than to think the person you are opposed to is totally evil.
I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity- it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one's mind.
If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.
In America all too few blows are struck into flesh. We kill the spirit here, we are experts at that. We use psychic bullets and kill each other cell by cell.
In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent.
It's not a good idea to put your wife into a novel; not your latest wife anyway.
It's not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.
Madness is locked beneath. It goes into tissues, is swallowed by the cells. The cells go mad. Cancer is their flag. Cancer is the growth of madness denied.
Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.
New York is one of the capitals of the world and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic, San Francisco is a lady, Boston has become Urban Renewal, Philadelphia and Baltimore and Washington blink like dull diamonds in the smog of Eastern Megalopolis, and New Orleans is unremarkable past the French Quarter. Detroit is a one-trade town, Pittsburgh has lost its golden triangle, St Louis has become the golden arch of the corporation, and nights in Kansas City close early. The oil depletion allowance makes Houston and Dallas naught but checkerboards for this sort of game. But Chicago is a great American city. Perhaps it is the last of the great American cities.
Obsession is the single most wasteful human activity, because with an obsession you keep coming back and back and back to the same question and never get an answer.
Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.
One of the diseases of the left is political correctness. If you're out of power for too long, then you just get worse and worse about how important your own ideas are.
Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.
Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.
Short-term amnesia is not the worst affliction if you have an Irish flair for the sauce.
The Army functions best when you're frightened of the man above you, and contemptuous of your subordinates.
The desire for success lubricates secret prostitutions in the soul.
The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.
The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.
The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.
The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.
The only true journey of knowledge is from the depth of one being to the heart of another.
The rage now is, oh, so deep it's almost comfortable. It has even approached the point where I can live with it philosophically. The world's not what I want it to be. But then no one ever said I had the right to design the world.
The sickness of our times for me has been just this damn thing that everything has been getting smaller and smaller and less and less important, that the romantic spirit has dried up, that there is no shame today... We're all getting so mean and small and petty and ridiculous, and we all live under the threat of extermination.
The sole virtue of losing your short-term memory is that it does free you to be your own editor.
The true religion of America has always been America.
The ultimate tendency of liberalism is vegetarianism.
There are four stages to marriage. First there's the affair, then there's the marriage, then children, and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce.
There are two kinds of brave men: those who are brave by the grace of nature, and those who are brave by an act of will.
There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you.
There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be.
There is one expanding horror in American life. It is that our long odyssey toward liberty, democracy and freedom-for-all may be achieved in such a way that utopia remains forever closed, and we live in freedom and hell, debased of style, not individual from one another, void of courage, our fear rationalized away.
There was that law of life so cruel and so just which demanded that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.
There's a subterranean impetus towards pornography so powerful that half the business world is juiced by the sort of half sex that one finds in advertisements.
Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation.
We can never know for certain where our prayers are likely to go, nor from whom the answers will come. Just when we think we are at our nearest to God, we could be assisting the Devil.
We sail across dominions barely seen, washed by the swells of time. We plow through fields of magnetism. Past and future come together on thunderheads and our dead hearts live with lightning in the wounds of the Gods.
We've got an agreeable, comfortable life here as Americans. But under it there's a huge, free-floating anxiety. Our inner lives, our inner landscape is just like that sky out there- it's full of smog. We really don't know what we believe anymore, we're nervous about everything.
What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil.
What were the phenomena of the world today? If I knew little else, I knew the answer- war, and the preparations for new war.
With the pride of an artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists, the small trumpet of your defiance.
You don't know a woman until you've met her in court.
Found 61 occurence(s) in 52,059 quotation(s).
Categories: Quotes of the day
KGB Quotation Database Search page design and software
contributed by Rafal Sulejman.
