“At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice.”

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.

The Pentagon talks about our power to ‘overkill’ Russia ten times, twenty times, perhaps forty-eight times. For my tax money, it is sufficient to overkill them once.

Today’s public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can’t read them either.