“I complain to one of my fellow servers that I don’t understand how she can go so long without food. “Well, I don’t understand how you can go so long without a cigarette,” she responds in a tone of reproach. Because work is what you do for others; smoking is what you do for yourself.”

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.

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.

Just do your job. Get in early. Stay late, and don’t complain. Fight the big fights.

Opportunity can benefit no man who has not fitted himself to seize it and use it. Opportunity woos the worthy, shuns the unworthy. Prepare yourself to grasp opportunity, and opportunity is likely to come your way. It is not so fickle, capricious and unreasoning as some complain.

We cannot complain to the possibility.

I’m not comically oriented. I get angry and I start complaining and then people start laughing. I don’t even want them to laugh half the time.

It was not that long ago that people were complaining about two cultures. If we only had it that good. today.

Not that we’re complaining, but I think with that comes a lot of responsibility.

No one is without their difficulties, whether in High, or low Life, & every person knows best where their own shoe pinches.

Time, so complain’d of, Who to no one man Shows partiality, Brings round to all men Some undimm’d hours.