“Sometimes the right response to evil is an appeal to powerful and effective social organization – an appeal to civilization itself.”

Adam Smith’s huge failure was the fact that he did not foresee the industrial revolution.

Staying married may have long-term benefits. You can elicit much more sympathy from friends over a bad marriage than you ever can from a good divorce.

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.

In its worse forms, conservatism is a matter of ‘I hate strangers and anything that’s different.’

Gossip is what you say about the objects of flattery when they aren’t present.

If you are young and you drink a great deal it will spoil your health, slow your mind, make you fat – in other words, turn you into an adult.

You know your children are growing up when they stop asking you where they came from and refuse to tell you where they’re going.

Southern California is a nice place, if you could cut out the show-business cancer. It just keeps spreading.

Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.

No doubt the ridiculous politicians are right to like politics. They have found careers in which success can be achieved by being ridiculous. Imagine Jimmy Carter or George W. Bush rising to the top of any other profession.

Don’t send funny greeting cards on birthdays or at Christmas. Save them for funerals, when their cheery effect is needed.

The problem in Afghanistan is really not so much land as water. It’s a dry country with ample amounts of water running through it, but not to good enough effect.

The most brilliant satire of all time was ‘A Modest Proposal’ by Jonathan Swift. You’ll notice how everything got straightened out in Ireland within days of that coming out.

America wasn’t founded so that we could all be better. America was founded so we could all be anything we damned well pleased.

The minute somebody joins a committee… they immediately suffer from committee brain. They become wildly over-enthusiastic, over-optimistic, over-pessimistic. Committees turn people into idiots, and politics is a committee.

The beauty of democracy is that an average, random, unremarkable citizen can lead it.

The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries.

My videos represent the artist in me very well, but not the kind of woman I am.

Science is incompetent to reason upon the creation of matter itself out of nothing. We have reached the utmost limit of our thinking faculties when we have admitted that because matter cannot be eternal and self-existent it must have been created.

When we were in the Dark Ages, it was a question of humanity somehow managing to forget about itself. We put God in the centre of society, and people forgot about their own nature and desires. There was a huge deal of repression.

Life–evolution–the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy–existence itself–is essentially change.

Justice is a machine that, when some one has once given it the starting push, rolls on of itself.

Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else.

The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself