The closer and more confidential our relationship with someone, the less we are entitled to ask about what we are not voluntarily told.

Nothing so soothes our vanity as a display of greater vanity in others; it make us vain, in fact, of our modesty.

There seems to be a terrible misunderstanding on the part of a great many people to the effect that when you cease to believe you may cease to behave.

Many people today don't want honest answers insofar as honest means unpleasant or disturbing, They want a soft answer that turneth away anxiety.

The closer and more confidential our relationship with someone, the less we are entitled to ask about what we are not voluntarily told.

Highly educated bores are by far the worst; they know so much, in such fiendish detail, to be boring about.

One of the misfortunes of our time is that in getting rid of false shame we have killed off so much real shame as well.

The Englishman wants to be recognized as a gentleman, or as some other suitable species of human being, the American wants to be considered a good guy.

The trouble with our age is all signposts and no destination.

It is the gossip columnist's business to write about what is none of his business.

The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy.

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.

Old age is an excellent time for outrage. My goal is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week.

Privacy was in sufficient danger before TV appeared, and TV has given it its death blow.

Individualism is rather like innocence; there must be something unconscious about it.

Individualism is rather like innocence There must be something unconscious about it.

A perfect conversation would run much less to brilliant sentences than to unfinished ones.

The closer and more confidential our relationship with someone the less we are entitled to ask about what we are not voluntarily told.

We are neurotically haunted today by the imminence and by the ignominy of failure. We know at how frightening a cost one succeeds to fail is something too awful to think about.

From the failure of the humanist tradition to participate fully or to act decisively civilizations may perhaps crumble or perish at the hands of barbarians. But unless the humanist tradition itself in some form survives there can really be no civilization at all.

Individualism is rather like innocence: There must be something unconscious about it.

There seems to be a great misunderstanding on the part of a great many people to the effect that when you cease to believe you may cease to behave.

No power of government ought to be employed in the endeavor to establish any system or article of belief on the subject of religion.

But in reality we are accompanied by the whole dancing universe.

Five hundred words a day is what I aim for. And I don't go on to the next chapter until I've polished and polished and polished the one I'm working on.

From the year of his birth in 1914 until the outbreak of war in 1941, my father lived in a mostly white, mostly working-class, mostly Irish Catholic neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York.

Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that. The Titanic saved lives because we're building bigger and bigger ships. So these people died, but we have effectively improved the safety of the system, and nothing failed in vain.

I sometimes wonder if two thirds of the globe is covered in red carpet.

I don't have the feeling that as a very young person I read books that absolutely made their mark on my mind.

When you spin a globe and point to a city and actually go to that city, you build an allowance of missed opportunities on the back end.

The Olympic Games are for the world and all nations must be admitted to them.

Drive slow and enjoy the scenery - drive fast and join the scenery.

Because our fight has been for such a long time we are isolated from the world, even after reconstruction we don't have much attention from people outside.

You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.

No Marxist can deny that the interests of socialism are higher than the interests of the right of nations to self-determination.

The cells of an organism are nodes in a richly interwoven communications network, transmitting and receiving, coding and decoding. Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment.

You need responsibility in life.

Let the consequences be what they will, I am determined to proceed.

The song Venus de Milo, the whole subject of it is Love is a drug.

If you watch 'SNL,' any time there's this thing with everyone singing, I'm, like, the one person who just has a straight line of dialogue because I can't sing to save my life.

The text illustrates the pictures - it provides a connective tissue for me. I usually refine the text last, partly because pictures are harder to do, so it's easier to edit words - I use text as grout in between the tiles of the pictures.

My inner child is not wounded.

So whoever does an atom’s weight of good will see it.

Feminists have confused opportunity with outcome.

There is some good in this world, and it's worth fighting for.

When I was a minor league player, my goal was to be a major leaguer. It's no different as a minor league manager.