No one can ever love us quite so much as we love ourselves.
I said it. I like to quote myself. I am not modest.
How hungrily we read about ourselves!
Democritus is studying philosophy here at Athens. This means that he delights in quarrels.
Although Americans justify their self-interest in moral terms, their true interest is never itself moral.
A year later, Ayatollah Bennett declared, I find no merit in the [drug] legalizers’ case. The simple fact is that drug use is wrong. And the moral argument, in the end, is the most compelling argument...
By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over.
Wilson was very much school of Montaigne. Like Montaigne, he was not exactly misogynistic but he felt that the challenge of another male mind was the highest sort of human exchange while possession of...
Never offend an enemy in a small way.
It was of course Jefferson’s gift at one time or another to put with eloquence the right answer to every moral question. In practice, however, he seldom deviated from an opportunistic course, calculat...
In Broadway, I suddenly found myself face to face with William de la Touche Clancey.Well! A long drawn-out syllable, in which fear and condescension were unpleasantly mingled. What is the young Old Pa...
In 1970, I wrote in the New York Times, of all uncongenial places, It is possible to stop most drug addiction in the United States within a very short time. Simply make all drugs available and sell th...
I am afraid that as people grow old there is a tendency for them to believe that what the past *ought* to have been it was.
Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players. … I have 10 or so, and that’s a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.
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 t...
Constant work, constant writing and constant revision. The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge. What he takes in he takes in normally the way any person takes i...
In writing and politicking, it's best not to think about it, just do it.
Helped the boy-governor eat the remains of the fruit, they discussed how it was that newspapers sometimes knew all sorts of secrets that they ought not to have known—and certainly ought not to publish...
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!
Since the reading skills of the American people are the lowest in the First World, the general public is always easy prey to manipulation by television.