Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.

Today, the degradation of the inner life is symbolized by the fact that the only place sacred from interruption is the private toilet.

One of the functions of intelligence is to take account of the dangers that come from trusting solely to the intelligence.

It has not been for nothing that the word has remained man's principal toy and tool: without the meanings and values it sustains, all man's other tools would be worthless.

Every new baby is a blind desperate vote for survival: people who find themselves unable to register an effective political protest against extermination do so by a biological act.

A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with, the wind.

War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.

Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.

Life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for training.

The artist does not illustrate science (but) he frequently responds to the same interests that a scientist does.

Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century.

The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.

Nothing is unthinkable, nothing impossible to the balanced person, provided it comes out of the needs of life and is dedicated to life's further development.

A day spent without the sight or sound of beauty, the contemplation of mystery, or the search of truth or perfection is a poverty-stricken day; and a succession of such days is fatal to human life.

To curb the machine and limit art to handicraft is a denial of opportunity.

Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.

Without fullness of experience, length of days is nothing. When fullness of life has been achieved, shortness of days is nothing. That is perhaps why the young have usually so little fear of death; they live by intensities that the elderly have forgotten.

The vast material displacements the machine has made in our physical environment are perhaps in the long run less important than its spiritual contributions to our culture.

A man of courage never needs weapons, but he may need bail.

New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.

The cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live.

However far modern science and techniques have fallen short of their inherent possibilities, they have taught mankind at least one lesson; nothing is impossible.

The way people in democracies think of the government as something different from themselves is a real handicap. And, of course, sometimes the government confirms their opinion.

Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.

Restore human legs as a means of travel. Pedestrians rely on food for fuel and need no special parking facilities.

Don't take the will for the deed; get the deed.

The earth is the Lord's fullness thereof: this is no longer a hollow dictum of religion, but a directive for economic action toward human brotherhood.

Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.

The timelessness of art is its capacity to represent the transformation of endless becoming into being.

The ultimate gift of conscious life is a sense of the mystery that encompasses it.

The convenience of timekeeping is greatly overrated and the people who practice it so faithfully that they lose the capacity for appreciating the fixed and the static and the spatially related experiences cut themselves off from a good part of reality.

You would go mad if you began to speculate about the impact your novel might have while you were still writing it.

The very damaging frightening part of postpartum is the lack of perspective and the lack of priority and understanding what is really important.

I was totally romanticizing the idea of Los Angeles when the Doors, Joni Mitchell, and Neil Young were hanging out there.

People can try to reinvent themselves. I don't think you can really change who you are, though, because who you are is pretty much where you came from and what you've done up to now.

In the romantic sense, I'm pretty useless with guys. If I see somebody who I'm attracted to, generally I just think, 'Oh well, he's not interested in me.' The only time that I talk to guys is when they talk to me first.

Stage is about imperfections and working with them, whether it be from you or the audience.

Gavin Lambert was the first person in the movie business my wife and I met when we moved to Los Angeles in 1964.

I'm not perfect. You're not perfect. But two people can be perfect together, perfect for each other.

I try not to look back on my career.

I've been in a position before where a president has turned to me in the Oval Office in a difficult moment, without any pleasantries, and said, 'I'm asking you as your president and Commander in Chief to take command of the international security force in Afghanistan.' The only response can be, 'Yes, Mr. President.'

The stress in surrealism is always upon life and thought, not on literature or technique. To a surrealist everything is dictated by the place which art has in life. Art would lose its function if it were separated from the problems of everyday living.

I've heard that, but since I'm computer illiterate I don't know how it all works. But since I'm on Prodigy tonight, I'm learning a lot through my typist, Peter.

The United States has done more for the war crimes tribunal than any other country in the world. We're turning over all the information we have, including intelligence information.

It seems to me that terrestrial beings, as they become more autonomous, psychologically richer, shut themselves up in a way against one another, and at the same time gradually become strangers to the cosmic environment and currents, impenetrable to one another, and incapable of exteriorizing themselves.

I like hiring people based on a feeling - this person gets it - rather than what they've done in the past.

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

The Tibetans are good at learning many skillful ways to show that everything we do becomes dharma practice, depending on which kind of approach we use.

I appreciate the sentiment that I am a popular woman in computer gaming circles; but I prefer being thought of as a computer game designer rather than a woman computer game designer. I don't put myself into gender mode when designing a game.