“The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.”

Baseball is the favorite American sport because it’s so slow. Any idiot can follow it. And just about any idiot can play it.

One is sorry one could not have taken both branches of the road. But we were not allotted multiple selves.

Ayn Rand is a rhetorician who writes novels I have never been able to read.

Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.

It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.

Nearly everyone who goes into a campaign is not only eager for the place he hopes to fill but for what might come after.

It is very difficult for a writer of my generation, if he is honest, to pretend indifference to the work of Somerset Maugham. He was always so entirely there.

Of all recent presidents, Clinton was expected to behave the most sensibly in economic matters. He understood how the economy works. But because he had used various dodges to stay out of the Vietnam War, he came to office ill at ease with the military.

It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.

I was the most famous kid in the United States. That was 1936.

In writing and politicking, it’s best not to think about it, just do it.

We’re not a democracy.

The unfed mind devours itself.

From April 1775 to July 1776, the undeclared war between England and its American colonies smoldered, flared up, appeared to sputter out… It was hardly, ever, a mass rebellion.

Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.

Why not just eliminate the federal income tax?

Coming from heavy music too, it’s really hard to have heavy music not sound too butthead-ish or jock-ish, and there’s a fine line between Limp Bizkit and Nirvana – there’s a fine line there, and it’s terrifying.

For an actor, for me, I love being able to tap into just heavy emotions. I don’t need to be balling in every scene, but I just love to feel different emotions when heading to set. It’s a lot of fun to play with.

Ah, but in time the heat of noontide passes, and to it there succeed nightfall and dusk, with a return to the quiet fold where for the weary an the heavy-laden there waits sleep, sweet sleep.

What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in!

The life of this world and the hereafter, in the heart of a person are like the two scales of a balance, when one becomes heavier, the other becomes lighter

Weep bitterly over the dead, for he is worthy, and then comfort thyself; drive heaviness away: thou shall not do him good, but hurt thyself.

I blundered into writing.

When one begins to think about it, America depends rather heavily on women’s passive dependence, their femininity. Femininity, if one still wants to call it that, makes American women a target and a victim of the sexual sell.