“Between the amateur and the professional . . . there is a difference not only in degree but in kind.”

The trouble with the sacred Individual is that he has no significance, except as he can acquire it from others, from the social whole.

The dawn of knowledge is usually the false dawn.

A novelist has mad a fictional representation of life. I doing so, he has revealed to us more significance, it may be, than he could find in life itself.

The heart wakens from coma and its dyspnea ends. Its strengthening pulse is to cross over into campground, to believe that the world has not been altogether lost or, if lost, then not altogether in vain.

The skillful man is, within the function of his skill, a different psychological organization. . . . A tennis player or a watchmaker or an airplane pilot is an automatism but he is also criticism and wisdom.

When evening quickens in the street, comes a pause in the day’s occupation that is known as the cocktail hour. It marks the lifeward turn.

The parks preserve it permanently in the inheritance of the American citizens.

The trouble with Reason is that it becomes meaningless at the exact point where it refuses to act.

New England is a finished place. Its destiny is that of Florence or Venice, not Milan while the American empire careens onward toward its unpredicted end. . . .

The rat stops gnawing in the wood, the dungeon walls withdraw, the weight is lifted your pulse steadies and the sun has found your heart, the day was not bad, the season has not been bad, there is sense and even promise in going on.

Art is man determined to die sane.

It is the first American section to be finished to achieve stability in the conditions of its life. It is the first old civilization, the first permanent civilization in America.

You can no more keep a martini in the refrigerator than you can keep a kiss there. The proper union of gin and vermouth is a great and sudden glory; it is one of the happiest marriages on earth and one of the shortest-lived.

The achieved West had given the United States something that no people had ever had before, an internal, domestic empire.

History abhors determinism but cannot tolerate chance.

The mind has its own logic but does not often let others in on it.

I’m not going to jump out of airplanes or anything like someone else I know.

Every time I step onto an airplane, I turn to the right and take a good, hard stare into the maw of the engine. I don’t know what I’m looking for. I just do it.

I’m on a lot of airplanes, so I just sip on red wine thinking of stupid ideas and, when I think of it, I wanna make it happen.

Before we had airplanes and astronauts, we really thought that there was an actual place beyond the clouds, somewhere over the rainbow. There was an actual place, and we could go above the clouds and find it.there.

I have some figures which compare the cost of one kilo of airplane compared to one kilo of rice. One kilo of airplane costs thirty thousand US dollars and one kilo of rice is seven cents. And if you want to pay for your one kilo of high-tech products with a kilo of rice, I don’t think we have enough.

I got addicted to Tetris, playing it in my basement, I was missing all these airplane flights over it. After the fourth one that I missed, I realized I needed to get rid of this thing – so ever since then, I don’t play video games any more.

There are no atheists on turbulent airplanes.

The triad is our ability of the United States to conduct nuclear attacks using airplanes, using missiles launched from silos or from the ground, and also from our nuclear subs’ ability to attack. And it’s important – all three of them are critical. It gives us the ability at deterrence.