We easily forgive our friends those faults that do no affect us ourselves.
the old ploy of the powerful: never refuse when you can confuse. Distraction and delay are always better than obstruction.
Every criminal leaves psychic fingerprints. And he can't wear gloves to hide them.
most of our social and educational institutions are designed to weed out or make over people. . . until we produce a world where everyone is a smart, quick-witted, aggressive person living on the surface of the mind without ever looking into the depths.
That's the worst thing about money - the moment you have some you begin to suspect everyone of trying to take it away from you. And usually they are.
In a city you thought of all life as human life. You had to live in the heart of the woods to realize that humanity was a slight ripple on the surface of a flood of life that seeped into every vacant crack, flowed into every biological vacuum the moment it occurred.
A critic is a person who rationalizes his likes and dislikes in such impressive language that the layman thinks he is reasoning instead of rationalizing.
Americans are finally coming to a point where they're accepting of religious criticism, is because George Bush is the first president who really put religion so front-and-center. He's the most Christ-y president we've ever had - and he is, not uncoincidentally, the biggest disaster we've ever had. I think even people who are religious don't like it shoved down their throat. I think people kind of get it on a certain level, that this is an antiscience administration, and we're living in a time where we can't afford to be antiscience - for environmental reasons, for educational reasons.
The stones were sharp, The wind came at my back; Walking along the highway, Mincing like a cat.
It is not for us to hold ourselves above the position of grateful people. We have to be able to accept. Anything else shows an unwillingness to grant someone else the superior place.
Of course the world of work begins to become - threatens to become - our only world, to the exclusion of all else. The demands of the working world grow ever more total, grasping ever more completely the whole of human existence.