Society and the World

A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.

Insects sting, not in malice, but because they want to live. It is the same with critics: they desire our blood, not our pain.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body; it calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.

What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but absence of self-criticism.

The only proper intoxication is conversation.

Ah, good conversation—there’s nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.

or the qualifications for a good companion, is a certain self-control, which now holds the subject, now lets it go.

Before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.

Conscience is a man’s compass, and though the needle sometimes deviates, though one often perceives irregularities in directing one’s course by it, still one must try to follow its direction.

We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on.

What a computer is to me is the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.

I have bought this wonderful machine—a computer. Now I am rather an authority on gods, so I identified the machine— it seems to me to be an Old Testament god with a lot of rules and no mercy.

The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.

Committees are consumers and sometimes sterilizers of ideas, rarely creators of them.

Civilization: if it is not in man’s heart—well, then, it is nowhere.

A child’s nature is too serious a thing to admit of its being regarded as a mere appendage to another human being.

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.

The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way.

Character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life— is the source from which self-respect springs.

A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.

There is only one valid definition of business: to create a customer.