“Experimental science is fascinating, but I don’t want to do it. I want other people to do it, and I’ll read about it.”

The Republican Party: a few million gun-toting, Armageddon-ready Baptists.

At best the family teaches the finest things human beings can learn from one another generosity and love. But it is also, all too often, where we learn nasty things like hate, rage and shame.

The urge to transform one’s appearance, to dance outdoors, to mock the powerful and embrace perfect strangers is not easy to suppress.” –Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets, 260.

Labor is like motherhood to most of our political leaders: a calling so fine and noble that it would be sullied by talk of vulgar, mundane things like pay.

Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month’s rent. Mug a janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime scene.

Frankly, I adore your catchy slogan, “Adoption, not Abortion,” although no one has been able to figure out, even with expert counseling, how to use adoption as a method of birth control, or at what time of the month it is most effective.

When you watch television, you never see people watching television. We love television because it brings us a world in which television does not exist.

No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.

So why do people keep on watching? The answer, by now, should be perfectly obvious: we love television because television brings us a world in which television does not exist. In fact, deep in their hearts, this is what the spuds crave most: a rich, new, participatory life.

… there hasn’t been a serious life-style trend since the couch potato was sighted, in about 1986, on one of its rare forays to the video store. Cocooning remains a significant mass enterprise, encouraged by the availability of five hundred new cable channels and microwavable popcorn.

It seems to me that there must be an ecological limit to the number of paper pushers the Earth can sustain.

we are reaching the point, if we have not passed it already, where the largest public housing program in America will be our penitentiary system.

Like many other women, I could not understand why every man who changed a diaper has felt impelled, in recent years, to write a book about it.

The internet was supposed to make this whole business of job searching rational and simple. You could post your resume and companies would search them and they’d find you. It doesn’t seem to work that way. There aren’t enough jobs for experienced, college educated managers and professionals.

People who just pretend to have a positive attitude may be more acceptable, but they will still attract according to how they are really vibrating- the energy they are emanating will attract their circumstances.

That’s free enterprise, friends: freedom to gamble, freedom to lose. And the great thing – the truly democratic thing about it – is that you don’t even have to be a player to lose.

“Language Arts Dept.” is the English office; “literature based on child’s reading level and experiential background” means that’s all they’ve got in the Book Room; “non-academic-minded” is a delinquent; and “It has come to my attention” means you’re in trouble.

[The business is] more corporate and more formulaic and less experiential.

I was a big fan of Middle Eastern elements of music and experimental electronic and tribal sounds.

Soon I knew the craft of experimental physics was beyond me – it was the sublime quality of patience – patience in accumulating data, patience with recalcitrant equipment – which I sadly lacked.

For me, a script has to be convincing, bold, and experimental. It needs to overpower all my senses.