Quote collection
457 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The most powerful country in the world is on its way back to the Stone Age. They say, "We were elected by the gods to govern the planet." But the truth is that what counts is getting hold of the last oil reserves. Instead of finding alternative energy sources, we try to subjugate entire regions of the world. People do not understand that by doing this, the country is going to absolute ruin."
"In matters of faith, inconvenient evidence is always suppressed while contradictions go unnoticed."
"Since the individual's desire to dominate his environment is not a desirable trait in a society which every day grows more and more confining, the average man must take to daydreaming."
"Nonprofit status is what created the Bible Belt. The tax code brought religion back to this country."
"anyone who sings about love and harmony and life [john lennon] is dangerous to someone who sings about death and killing and subduing [Nixon]"
"The first TV babies are now writing with a TV mind that has no attention span at all."
"As one gets older, litigation replaces sex."
"Lonely children often have imaginary playmates but I was never lonely; rather, I was solitary, and wanted no company at all other than books and movies, and my own imagination."
"I'm a much worse guest than I am a host, and I'm not an awfully good host either. I really like being alone."
"People like to re-invent you, according to cliché. There are a lot of stores about me that really apply only to Capote or Mailer or somebody else. Everything is a mish mash."
"I have no social position and I stay away from what is known as society as much as possible."
"The whole point to American journalism is what ought to be true is true. Since I ought to be arrogant, impressed with my social position, overwhelmed by my beauty, therefore I am."
"Age bothers everybody. I was never narcissistic about my looks, but people thought that I should be so therefore I was."
"I don't seem to be cynical to myself but how what I say goes down with others is their problem. I'm realistic."
"Writing when you are already very old means you have lived through the endings of so many things, you are more aware of the shape life takes. You begin to know Death, you've been close to it. But youth can barely imagine the end of this journey."
"The British are absolutely hung up on class, and whenever they start to really - class for the English is like sex for Americans: They start to shake all over when the subject comes up."
"You can only have a war with another country. You can't have a war with bad temper or a war against paranoids."
"The hatred Americans have for their own government is pathological, if understandable. At one level it is simply thwarted greed: since our religion is making a buck, giving a part of that buck to any government is an act against nature."
"Only a country that is based upon an extremely primitive religion, which is Christianity, I am a devoted enemy of monotheism in all of its forms, could have come with a categorizing of people as one thing or the other."
"I don't see us winning the war. We have made enemies of one billion Muslims."