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

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.

At best the family teaches the finest things human beings can learn from one another generosity and love. But it is also, all too often, where we learn nasty things like hate, rage and shame.

The urge to transform one’s appearance, to dance outdoors, to mock the powerful and embrace perfect strangers is not easy to suppress.” –Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets, 260.

Labor is like motherhood to most of our political leaders: a calling so fine and noble that it would be sullied by talk of vulgar, mundane things like pay.

Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month’s rent. Mug a janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime scene.

Frankly, I adore your catchy slogan, “Adoption, not Abortion,” although no one has been able to figure out, even with expert counseling, how to use adoption as a method of birth control, or at what time of the month it is most effective.

When you watch television, you never see people watching television. We love television because it brings us a world in which television does not exist.

No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.

So why do people keep on watching? The answer, by now, should be perfectly obvious: we love television because television brings us a world in which television does not exist. In fact, deep in their hearts, this is what the spuds crave most: a rich, new, participatory life.

… there hasn’t been a serious life-style trend since the couch potato was sighted, in about 1986, on one of its rare forays to the video store. Cocooning remains a significant mass enterprise, encouraged by the availability of five hundred new cable channels and microwavable popcorn.

It seems to me that there must be an ecological limit to the number of paper pushers the Earth can sustain.

we are reaching the point, if we have not passed it already, where the largest public housing program in America will be our penitentiary system.

Like many other women, I could not understand why every man who changed a diaper has felt impelled, in recent years, to write a book about it.

The clash between science and religion has not shown that religion is false and science is true. It has shown that all systems of definition are relative to various purposes, and that none of them actually ‘grasp’ reality.

I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.

False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science.

The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.

The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.

The internet is full of many false and unverified quotes.

The internet is full of many false and unverified quotes.

A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.