“To preserve the human race, it is now necessary to reorganize society. To this end, an Authority must be created with the power to control human population, to redistribute food, to purify air, water, soil, to re-pattern the cities.”

Like the TV networks, once our government has a hit, it will be repeated over and over again.

Now you have people in Washington who have no interest in the country at all. They’re interested in their companies, their corporations grabbing Caspian oil.

Having no contemporaries left means you cannot say, ‘Well, so-and-so will like this,’ which you do when you’re younger. You realize there is no so-and-so anymore. You are your own so-and-so. There is a bleak side to it.

By the end of World War II, we were the most powerful and least damaged of the great nations. We also had most of the money. America’s hegemony lasted exactly five years.

I’ve yet to read a memoir by anyone I’ve known at all well that came anywhere near to the truth.

What the police in their ignorance have not figured out is that they have lost all credibility since World War II. They are sort of parasites on the fringe of society and do no particular good for anyone except possibly themselves.

Boys don’t like girls around when they do boy things.

American history has fallen more and more into the hands of academics.

I was raised in the Washington household of my grandfather Senator Thomas P. Gore of Oklahoma, and have known politicians intimately all my life.

I can’t name three first-rate literary critics in the United States. I’m told there are a few hidden away at universities, but they don’t print them in ‘The New York Times.’

Some have deplored Lincoln’s indifference to Christianity. But it was not religion, it was religiosity that put him off.

All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.

Never have children, only grandchildren.

That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.

The American high school graduate is two years behind his English, French or German counterpart; in Alabama, God knows how far behind.

The first grown-up book that I read on my own was a nineteenth-century edition of ‘Tales from Livy’ that I’d found in my grandfather’s library.

Growth often looks like out growing old patterns and good people.

We are all of us, unique – each a unique pattern of creativity and if we do not fulfill it, it is lost for all time.

Success is sequential, not simultaneous.

When you start with an idea, or something hits you, then you have to follow that through to the end, and it’s the following through to the end that makes the pattern. That, for me, is choreography.

Meditation isn’t really about getting rid of thoughts, it’s about changing the pattern of grasping on to things, which in our everyday experience is our thoughts.

One of the deepest habitual patterns that we have is to feel that now is not enough.

Perhaps the biggest tragedy of our lives is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns.

I don’t have a set pattern. I take things as they come. Usually with a great amount of relish. I just lay back and wait for it to happen. And it usually does.