“In fact, there is clear evidence of black intellectual superiority: in 1984, 92 percent of blacks voted to retire Ronald Reagan, compared to only 36 percent of whites.”

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.

Cheerfulness, up to and including delusion and false hope, has a recognized place in medicine.

The secret of the truly successful … is that they learned early in life how not to be busy.

If you can attribute your success entirely to your own mental effort, to your own attitude, to some spiritual essence that you have that is better than other peoples, then that must feel pretty good.

Poverty is not a character failing or a lack of motivation. Poverty is a shortage of money.

The media have just buried the last yuppie, a pathetic creature who had not heard the news that the great pendulum of public consciousness has just swung from Greed to Compassion and from Tex-Mex to meatballs

James Bond in his Sean Connery days … was the first well-known bachelor on the American scene who was not a drifter or a degenerate and did not eat out of cans.

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

The fact that slavery is written into the Constitution is about as entrenched a form of classism as you could possibly imagine.

You can experience consciousness now by experiencing the fact that you exist.

And Supernatural, in fact, going there wasit felt like a place where I had to actually, um, learn to be kind of manly. I felt like I had to kind of change my, like, way of speaking for a little bit, just to kind of fit in, oddly enough. Which was weird.

I find the fact that billionaires are quoted as if the fact that they are billionaires gives them some kind of wisdom is outrageous.

The AEC scientists were so narrowly focused on arming the United States for nuclear war that they failed to perceive facts – even widely known ones – that were outside their limited field of vision.

People rely on Wikipedia, and a lot of it is wrong. But because there it is on the Internet, they assume it’s right.

This I know for a fact: the reason African women have children is so that there’s someone else to do the housework.

Renunciation – that is the great fact we all, individuals and classes, have to learn. In trying to avoid it we bring misery to ourselves and others.