Quote collection
457 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The U.S. Bill of Rights is being steadily eroded, with two million telephone calls tapped, 30 million workers under electronic surveillance, and, says the author, countless Americans harassed by a government that wages spurious wars against drugs and terrorism."
"The word heterosexual is an adjective, the word homosexual is an adjective. They describe an activity. Of course there's a homosexual activity; of course there's a heterosexual activity. But there's no homosexual person. There's no heterosexual person. Everybody is everything."
"Novels, except as aids to masturbation, play no part in contemporary life."
"The American vice is explanation."
"Most writers write books that they wouldn't read. I ought to know; I've done it myself."
"The worst thing to happen to Lincoln - aside from the unfortunate incident at Ford's theatre - was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg."
"A babble of words that no one understands now fills the airwaves, and language loses all meaning as we sink slowly, mindlessly, into herstory rather than history because most rapists are men, aren't they?"
"France is a nation devoted to the false hypothesis on which it then builds marvelously logical structures."
"What is there to say, finally, except that pain is bad and pleasure good, life all, death nothing."
"If you want to rise in politics in the United States, there is one subject you must stay away from, and that is politics."
"There are certain truths so true that they are practically unbelievable."
"Ideally, the writer needs no audience other than the few who understand that it is immodest and greedy to want more."
"I was never my own type so I completely missed my beauty all through my youth."
"I like the distance that Europe gives me. Also if I stayed in America I'd be a full-time politician and have no time for writing, which is why I went to Europe to live in 1961."
"I have no television to go on so I get a lot of writing done. That's my substitute for television."
"I'm in Hollywood right now, surrounded by nothing but the sons and grandsons of movie stars."
"I find in most novels no imagination at all. They seem to think the highest form of the novel is to write about marriage, because that's the most important thing there is for middle-class people."
"Miss Rand now tells us that what we have thought was right is really wrong. The lesson should have read: One for one and none for all."
"Having no talent is no longer enough."
"You cannot get through the density of the propaganda with which the American people, through the dreaded media, have been filled and the horrible public educational system we have for the average person. It's just grotesque."