Progressive liberals seem incapable of stating the obvious truth: that we who are well off should be willing to share more of what we have with poor people not for the poor people's sake but for our own; i.e., we should share what we have in order to become less narrow and frightened and lonely and self-centered people.

I'd like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time, instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them.

This is so American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.

Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.

The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.

TV's "real" agenda is to be "liked," because if you like what you're seeing, you'll stay tuned. TV is completely unabashed about this; it's its sole raison.

Think of the old cliché about ‘the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.’ This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head.