In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or the propaganda might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies - the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.

But then every man is ludicrous if you look at him from outside, without taking into account what’s going on in his heart and mind.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.

The critics don't interest me because they're concerned with what's past and done, while I'm concerned with what comes next.

Man is unique in organizing the mass murder of his own species.

You've got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can't think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases.