Society and the World

[ Of Ronald Reagan’s proposals to increase government revenues by reducing taxes :] Voodoo economics.

 

Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes. Woodstock rises from his pages.

 

The Revolution is like Saturn, it devours its own children.

 

To crush, to annihilate a man utterly, to inflict on him the most terrible of punishments so that the most ferocious murderer would shudder at it and dread it beforehand, one need only give him work of an absolutely, completely useless and irrational character.

To crush, to annihilate a man utterly, to inflict on him the most terrible of punishments so that the most ferocious murderer would shudder at it and dread it beforehand, one need only give him work of an absolutely, completely useless and irrational character.

If you direct your whole thought to work itself, none of the things which invade eyes or ears will reach the mind.

We must think things not words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand, if we are to keep the real and the true.

A woman never forgets her sex. She would rather talk with a man than an angel, any day.

A woman never forgets her sex. She would rather talk with a man than an angel, any day.

A woman can be anything that the man who loves her would have her be.

A delicate wit is a corruption which a nation takes a long time to acquire. It is only worn-out nations that possess it.

There is nothing earthly that lasts so well, on the whole, as money. A man’s learning dies with him; even his virtues fade out of remembrance; but the

The absence of vices adds so little to the sum of one’s virtues.

I don’t believe the Devil would give half as much for the services of a sinner as he would for those of one of these folks that are always doing virtuous acts in a way to make them unpleasing.

In daily life we never understand each other, neither complete clairvoyance nor complete confessional exists.

[Tolerance] is just a makeshift, suitable for an overcrowded and overheated planet. It carries on when love gives out, and love generally gives out as soon as we move away from our home and our friends.

Thinking is hard work. One can’t bear burdens and ideas at the same time.

There is one disadvantage which the man of philosophical habits of mind suffers, as compared with the man of action. While he is talcing an enlarged and rational view of the matter before him, he lets his chance slip through his fingers.

Taste is the fundamental quality which sums up all other qualities. It is the ne plus ultra of the intelligence.

Wherever learning breeds specialists, the sum of human culture is enhanced thereby. That is the illusion and consolation of specialists.

Wherever learning breeds specialists, the sum of human culture is enhanced thereby. That is the illusion and consolation of specialists.

A poet on Pegasus, reciting his own verses, is hardly more to be dreaded than a mounted specialist.

Society is always trying in some way or other to grind us down to a single flat surface.

We should render a service to a friend to bind him closer to us, and to an enemy in order to make a friend of him.