“The United States is the only civilized country in the world to class its teachers at the bottom of the social scale.”

I was like everyone else when Obama was elected – optimistic.

Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.

Baseball is the favorite American sport because it’s so slow. Any idiot can follow it. And just about any idiot can play it.

One is sorry one could not have taken both branches of the road. But we were not allotted multiple selves.

Ayn Rand is a rhetorician who writes novels I have never been able to read.

Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.

It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.

Nearly everyone who goes into a campaign is not only eager for the place he hopes to fill but for what might come after.

It is very difficult for a writer of my generation, if he is honest, to pretend indifference to the work of Somerset Maugham. He was always so entirely there.

Of all recent presidents, Clinton was expected to behave the most sensibly in economic matters. He understood how the economy works. But because he had used various dodges to stay out of the Vietnam War, he came to office ill at ease with the military.

It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.

I was the most famous kid in the United States. That was 1936.

In writing and politicking, it’s best not to think about it, just do it.

We’re not a democracy.

The unfed mind devours itself.

From April 1775 to July 1776, the undeclared war between England and its American colonies smoldered, flared up, appeared to sputter out… It was hardly, ever, a mass rebellion.

An investor who proposes to ignore near-term market fluctuations needs greater resources for safety and must not operate on so large a scale, if at all, with borrowed money.

I now have Grit Scale scores from thousands of American adults. My data provide a snapshot of grit across adulthood.

Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.

I’m not against extracting a modest amount of wildlife out of the ocean for human consumption, but I am really concerned about the large-scale industrial fishing that engages in destructive practices like trawling and longlining.

The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense is his life, large-brained, large-lunged, hot, ecstatic, his frame charged with buoyancy and his heart with song.

I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty.

That’s one of our biggest challenges is finding out how to do that. There are times when you have to scale back.

In Germany, an effort one thousandth the scale of the American was applied to the problem of producing atomic energy that would drive engines.