“As for civil liberties, any one who is not vigilant may one day find himself living, if not in a police state, at least in a police city.”

Now you have people in Washington who have no interest in the country at all. They’re interested in their companies, their corporations grabbing Caspian oil.

Having no contemporaries left means you cannot say, ‘Well, so-and-so will like this,’ which you do when you’re younger. You realize there is no so-and-so anymore. You are your own so-and-so. There is a bleak side to it.

By the end of World War II, we were the most powerful and least damaged of the great nations. We also had most of the money. America’s hegemony lasted exactly five years.

I’ve yet to read a memoir by anyone I’ve known at all well that came anywhere near to the truth.

What the police in their ignorance have not figured out is that they have lost all credibility since World War II. They are sort of parasites on the fringe of society and do no particular good for anyone except possibly themselves.

Boys don’t like girls around when they do boy things.

American history has fallen more and more into the hands of academics.

I was raised in the Washington household of my grandfather Senator Thomas P. Gore of Oklahoma, and have known politicians intimately all my life.

I can’t name three first-rate literary critics in the United States. I’m told there are a few hidden away at universities, but they don’t print them in ‘The New York Times.’

Some have deplored Lincoln’s indifference to Christianity. But it was not religion, it was religiosity that put him off.

To preserve the human race, it is now necessary to reorganize society. To this end, an Authority must be created with the power to control human population, to redistribute food, to purify air, water, soil, to re-pattern the cities.

All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.

Never have children, only grandchildren.

That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.

The American high school graduate is two years behind his English, French or German counterpart; in Alabama, God knows how far behind.

The first grown-up book that I read on my own was a nineteenth-century edition of ‘Tales from Livy’ that I’d found in my grandfather’s library.

The civil rights movement was very important in my house, and then Vietnam was very important ’cause there were two boys, so I came of age during a very heated political climate.

Rosa Parks was primed, she had the Civil Rights Movement behind her, she didn’t just decide to sit on the bus, it was strategic.

Then the people won’t trust in them – and the result will be civil war or fragmentation of the country.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the most sweeping civil rights legislation of its day, and included women’s rights as part of its reforms.

We are sure to be losers when we quarrel with ourselves; it is civil war.

I’m trying to be a singer, not a civil rights leader.

With this film, it’s nice to see that the trauma is presented from a white male that was in the Civil War and that trauma affects him in a way that still exists.

Companies aren’t families. They’re battlefields in a civil war.