“German is of stone, limestone, pudding stone, marble, granite even, and so to a considerable degree is English, whereas French is bronze and gives out a metallic resonance with tones that neither German nor English tolerate.”

Government is the art of the momentary feasible, of the least bad attainable, and not of the rationally most desirable.

[Describing his house:] It is a library with living rooms attached.

Genius is the capacity for productive reaction against one’s training.

Miracles happen to those who believe in them.

Boast is always a cry of despair, except in the young it is a cry of hope.

We usually meet all of our relatives only at funerals where somebody always observes: “Too bad we can’t get together more often”.

The ultimate justification of the work of art is to help the spectator to become a work of art himself.

Government lasts as long as the under-taxed can defend themselves against the over-taxed.

A complete life may be one ending in so full an identification with the oneself that there is no self left to die.

International affairs will be placed on a better footing when it is understood that there is no way of punishing a people for the crimes of its rulers.

No artifact is a work of art if it does not help to humanize us. Without art…our world would have remained a jungle.

Literature in its most comprehensive sense is the autobiography of humanity.

Between truth and the search for it, I choose the second.

As I got warmed up, and felt perfectly at home in talk, I heard myself boasting, lying, exaggerating. Oh, not deliberately, far from it. It would be unconvivial and dull to stop and arrest the flow of talk, and speak only after carefully considering whether I was telling the truth.

When everything else physical and mental seems to diminish, the appreciation of beauty is on the increase.

I never felt that there was anything enviable in youth. I cannot recall that any of us, as youths, admired our condition to excess or had a desire to prolong it.

I studied at the Budapest Academy of Theatrical Arts for four years and emerged with a degree.

I try to deal with the complexities of power and social life, but as far as the visual presentation goes I purposely avoid a high degree of difficulty.

When a government is arrived to that degree of corruption as to be incapable of reforming itself, it would not lose much by being new moulded.

The so-called language of Barbara Kruger is vernacular language. Obviously, I pick through bits and pieces of it and figure out to some degree how to objectify my experience of the world, using pictures and words that construct and contain me.

The University of Google is where I got my degree from.

Conscription for war is inconsistent with freedom of conscience, which is not merely the right to believe but to act on the degree of truth that one receives, to follow a vocation which is God-inspired and God-directed.

If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.

Pleasure admitted in undue degree, enslaves the will, nor leaves the judgment free.