Where ruts have not yet been worn, it requires less effort to stay out of them.

The force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century.

Formerly, a public man needed a private secretary for a barrier between himself and the public. Nowadays he has a press secretary, to keep him properly in the public eye.

We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in their place.

It is only a short step from exaggerating what we can find in the world to exaggerating our power to remake the world.

The world of crime is a last refuge of the authentic, uncorrupted, spontaneous event.

America has been a land of dreams. A land where the aspirations of people from countries cluttered with rich, cumbersome, aristocratic, ideological pasts can reach for what once seemed unattainable. Here they have tried to make dreams come true. Yet now... we are threatened by a new and particularly American menace. It is not the menace of class war, of ideology, of poverty, of disease, of illiteracy, or demagoguery, or of tyranny, though these now plague most of the world. It is the menace of unreality.