“I think I have a normal threshold of anger, but it’s true that I am, by nature, belligerent.”

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.

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.

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.

The United States is the only civilized country in the world to class its teachers at the bottom of the social scale.

Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.

In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you’re a great writer, you must say that you are.

What I am is something unbearable for the world of journalism and the world of cliches. I’m a realist.