“All war propaganda consists, in the last resort, in substituting diabolical abstractions for human beings. Similarly, those who defend war have invented a pleasant sounding vocabulary of abstractions in which to describe the process of mass murder.”

Hug me till you drug me, honey; Kiss me till I’m in a coma.

If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely.

It isn’t a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past.

If we evolved a race of Isaac Newtons, that would not be progress. For the price Newton had to pay for being a supreme intellect was that he was incapable of friendship, love, fatherhood, and many other desirable things. As a man he was a failure; as a monster he was superb.

Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.

A majority of young people seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis forty years before they get the physical kind.

Liberty? Why it doesn’t exist. There is no liberty in this world, just gilded cages.

As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends correspondingly to increase. And the dictator will do well to encourage that freedom…it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate.

The people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, these are never the publicans and the sinners. No, they’re the virtuous, respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals.

To be well informed, one must read quickly a great number of merely instructive books. To be cultivated, one must read slowly and with a lingering appreciation the comparatively few books that have been written by men who lived, thought, and felt with style.

The nature of power is such that even those who have not sought it, but have had it forced upon them, tend to acquire a taste for more.

The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

For at least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols

Never give children a chance of imagining that anything exists in isolation. Make it plain from the very beginning that all living is relationship. Show them relationships in the woods, in the fields, in the ponds and streams, in the village and in the country around it. Rub it in.

Democracy can hardly be expected to flourish in societies where political and economic power is being progressively concentrated and centralized. But the progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such a concentration and centralization of power.

Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.

We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat.

The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful.

Our love story comes to me in waves, in movie stills and long summer afternoons spent under a sky of incessant blue. I still think of your eyes in flashes of color, your hands in a frenetic, feverish blur-your smile a mosaic of light and shadow. I still find myself lost in those moments of abstraction.

Everything will be all right – you know when? When people, just people, stop thinking of the United Nations as a weird Picasso abstraction and see it as a drawing they made themselves.

New York is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.

The only and one way to say what abstract art or art-as-art is, is to say what it is not.

An audience is an abstraction; it has no taste. It must depend on the only person who has (pardon, should have), the conductor.

Pure drawing is an abstraction. Drawing and colour are not distinct, everything in nature is coloured.