If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.

Hardest of all, as one becomes older, is to accept that sapient remarks can be drawn from the most unwelcome or seemingly improbable sources, and that the apparently more trustworthy sources can lead one astray.

The concept of loneliness and exile and self-sufficiency continually bucks me up.

A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realisation that you can't make old friends.

I have nowhere claimed nor even implied that unbelief is a guarantee of good conduct or even an indicator of it.

The press is still investing itself, it seems to me, in a sort of cynicism. It comes out better for them if they can predict hard times, bogging down, sniping, attrition.

Hannah Arendt in her study of totalitarianism borrowed from Immanuel Kant the concept of radical evil, of evil that's so evil that in the end it destroys itself, it's so committed to evil and it's so committed to hatred and cruelty that it becomes suicidal. My definition of it is the surplus value that's generated by totalitarianism. It means you do more violence, more cruelty than you absolutely have to to stay in power.