Politicians are the same all over; they promise to build a bridge even where there is no water.
Spread ideas that undercut the content world of Amerika. We must alienate middle-class Amerika. All watches and clocks will be destroyed; barbers will go to rehabilitation camps where they will grow their hair long.
Let’s make capitalism work for everybody.
I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
For a transitory enchanted moment, man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which the taints, the sickness, and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions.
A belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
A certain kind of rich man afflicted with the symptoms of moral dandyism sooner or later comes to the conclusion that it isn’t enough merely to make money. He feels obliged to hold views, to espouse causes and elect Presidents, to explain to a trembling world how and why the world went wrong. The spectacle is nearly always comic.
Most of us continue to work for wages in a highly unequal social system that denies us meaningful work and a decent return for our labor. That simple fact defines a set of common interests of immense democratic potential.
There are good reasons why everybody should heed politicans’ advice not to believe the media. One of the best is that the media report what politicians say.
With words we govern men.
America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence.
Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.
Cinema, radio, television, and magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen without hearing.
Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.
I find television very educational. Every time someone switches it on, I go into another room and read a good book.
From the cowardice that shrinks from new truth, from the laziness that is content with half-truths, from the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth, O God of Truth, deliver us.
The function of freedom is to free somebody else.
The revolt of the poet is invariably conservative at its roots. . . . Not politically conservative, but imaginatively conservative, with a profound regard for what is given, as earth or air, sun or moon or stars, or the dreams of man.
If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.
I realized either I was crazy or the world was crazy; and I picked on the world. And of course I was right.
