“Seduction is always more singular and sublime than sex and it commands the higher price.”

Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.

What is a society without a heroic dimension?

The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyper real.

There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room.

Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.

The great person is ahead of their time, the smart make something out of it, and the blockhead, sets themselves against it.

To love someone is to isolate him from the world, wipe out every trace of him, dispossess him of his shadow, drag him into a murderous future. It is to circle around the other like a dead star and absorb him into a black light.

The abjection of our political situation is the only true challenge today.

It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.

Santa Barbara is a paradise; Disneyland is a paradise; the U.S. is a paradise. Paradise is just paradise. Mournful, monotonous, and superficial though it may be, it is paradise. There is no other.

Only facing up to this situation in all its desperation can help us get out of it.

We shall never resolve the enigma of the relation between the negative foundations of greatness and that greatness itself.

You are born modern, you do not become so.

I hesitate to deposit money in a bank. I am afraid I shall never dare to take it out again.

It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you.

Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia.

This is how we must comport ourselves if we are to fulfill our Lord’s command in the Gospel of John (17:21), Ut unum sint, that all may be one.

Do what Jesus says… what he commands through his ministers who are in the Church [see 1 Cor 6:4]. Be subject to his vicars, your leaders, not only those who are gentle and kind, but even those who are overbearing [see 1 Pt 2:18].

Why has no religion this command before all others: Thou shalt work?

The AEC had at its command an army of highly skilled scientists.

I was coming into a situation I didn’t really know much about, and now, after a couple of years, the character’s kind of mellowed and gotten comfortable working at the command center and very comfortable with his troops.

The power to command frequently causes failure to think.

Nature has not got two voices, you know, one of them condemning all day what the other commands.

The only thing I command is respect.