“The human race is plainly nothing in eternity, but to us, in time, it is everything and ought not to die.”

You hear all this whining going on, ‘Where are our great writers?’ The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?

Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.

I am not, at heart, a playwright.

Anybody who is stupid enough to want to be remembered deserves to be forgotten right now.

We are pleased to dismiss politics as entirely corrupt, if not financially, intellectually.

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.

Between fourteen and nineteen, I must have begun and abandoned six novels.

Obama just came swiftly out of nowhere, which was a relief to those of us who care about the Republic, and at first he seemed a very good thing.

Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they’re both just aspirin.

I’m a fervent foe of water pollution, whether it is our own Hudson River or Philadelphia’s tap water.

TV news is not very instructive.

The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity – much less dissent.

World War II made prosperous the United States, which had been undergoing a depression for a dozen years, and made very rich those magnates and their managers who govern the republic – with many a wink – in the people’s name.

There is only one party in the United States: the Property party… and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.

There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices.

Fifty percent of people won’t vote, and fifty percent don’t read newspapers. I hope it’s the same fifty percent.

We have the purveyors of hatred who take every single incident between people of two races and try to make a race war out of it and drive wedges into people. And this does not need to be done.

We are special because we’ve been united not by a common race or ethnicity. We’re bound together by common values. That family is the most important institution in society. That almighty God is the source of all we have.

Most troubles are unnecessary. We have Nature beaten; we can make her grow wheat; we can keep warm when she sends blizzards. So we raise the devil just for pleasure–wars, politics, race-hatreds, labor-disputes.

Yet Mr. Rockefeller has systematically played with loaded dice, and it is doubtful if there has ever been a time since 1872 when he has run a race with a competitor and started fair.

Somebody must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have fallen upon me to do so.

I shall feel I have done my race a service. Other considerations are of minor importance.

On one hand, I think it’s very important to talk about race and talk about gender, because if it’s not talked about, then we won’t progress.

My attitude is govern as if you’ve run your last race. That’s not to say I’ve run my last race, but govern with a liberation and a freedom; change your mind frame to operate that way.