The moral duty of the free writer is to begin his work at home: to be a critic of his own community, his own country, his own government, his own culture. The more freedom the writer possesses, the greater the moral obligation to play the role of critic.

I have been called a curmudgeon, which my obsolescent dictionary defines as a "surly, illmannered, badtempered fellow." ... Nowadays, curmudgeon is likely to refer to anyone who hates hypocrisy, cant, sham, dogmatic ideologies, the pretenses and evasions of euphemism, and has the nerve to point out unpleasant facts and takes the trouble to impale these sins on the skewer of humor and roast them over the fires of empiric fact, common sense, and native intelligence. In this nation of bleating sheep and braying jackasses, it then becomes an honor to be labeled curmudgeon.

Nothing could be more reckless than to base one's moral philosophy on the latest pronouncements of science.

Most of the literary classics are worth reading, if you've nothing better to do.

Not all questions can be answered.

Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best.

Pure science is a myth: Both mathematical theoreticians like Albert Einstein and practical crackpots like Henry Ford dealt with different aspects of the same world.