“in our culture, the professional, and largely white, middle class is taken as a social norm – a bland and neutral mainstream – from which every other group or class is ultimately a kind of deviation.”

America is addicted to wars of distraction.

The ‘working poor,’ as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society.

Lenders, including major credit companies as well as payday lenders, have taken over the traditional role of the street-corner loan shark, charging the poor insanely high rates of interest.

It’s a glorious universe the positive thinkers have come up with, a vast, shimmering aurora borealis in which desires mingle freely with their realizations. … Dreams go out and fulfill themselves; wishes need only to be articulated.

The “discovery” of poverty at the beginning of the 1960s was something like the “discovery” of America almost five hundred years earlier. In the case of each of these exotic terrains, plenty of people were on the site before the discoverers ever arrived.

From the point of view of the pharmaceutical industry, the AIDS problem has already been solved. After all, we already have a drug which can be sold at the incredible price of $8,000 an annual dose, and which has the added virtue of not diminishing the market by actually curing anyone.

My Turn is the distilled bathwater of Mrs. Reagan’s life. It is for the most part sweetish, with a tart edge of rebuke, but disappointingly free of dirt or particulate matter of any kind.

Exercise is the yuppie version of bulimia.

The fact is that heterosexual sex for most people is in no way free of the power relations between men and women.

Both chronic, long-term poverty and downward mobility from the middle class are in the same category of things that America likes not to think about.

That’s the really neat thing about Dan Quayle, as you must have realized from the first moment you looked into those lovely blue eyes: impeachment insurance.

Money does not bring happiness’ – only the wherewithal, perhaps, to endure its absence.

Warriors make wars, but it is also true that, in what has so far been an endless reproductive cycle, war makes warriors.

If God cares about our puny species, then disasters prove that he is not all-powerful; and if he is all-powerful, then clearly he doesn’t give a damn.

In economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons; in foreign policy, we drew on themes fashioned by the nomad warriors of the Eurasian steppes. In spiritual matters, we emulated the braying intolerance of our archenemies, the Shite fundamentalists.

I think it’s tragic that we have this human capacity, which appears to be hardwired, or so the evolutionary biologists say, for collective joy. We have these techniques for generating it that go back thousands of years, and yet we tend not to use this.

As long as you perceive that anyone is holding you back, you have not taken full responsibility for your own liberation. Liberation means that you stand free of making demands on others and life to make you happy.

What puzzles most of us are the things which have been left in the movies rather than the things which have been taken out.

All the things I thought I was – simple and plain and sometime funny – are very small words.

When you have His joy in your heart, it doesn’t necessarily mean your pain or hurt will be taken away. It means you’ll be able to bear it.

Unless action is taken soon – unless we can display the same vision of that earlier period – we will lose the treasure of California’s open space and environmental beauty.

By establishing reading societies, and subscription libraries, and taking these under our direction, and supplying them through our labors

The biggest risk I’ve ever taken is going on American Idol and trying to be myse

Life brings what it brings. I might be young but I’ve learnt this: prepare for each blind corner with your strongest shoulder dropped, ready to smash through whatever is thrown at you next.