The ideal to which John Adams subscribed-that we would be a nation of laws, not of men-was quickly subverted when the churches forced upon everyone, through supposedly neutral and just laws, their innumerable taboos on sex, alcohol, gambling. We are now indeed a nation of laws, mostly bad and certainly antihuman.

To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.

I assume that the point of American democracy is you can express any point of view you want.

I came out of Capitol Hill. Well, that's just not an ordinary background for a writer of the ordinary American sort.

Since no one can ever know for certain whether or not his own view of life is the correct one, it is absolutely impossible for him to know if someone else's is the wrong one.

In Southern Europe, we have, of course, very bad governments.

I'd say that Holland, Sweden, and Denmark are all better countries politically than the United States. The average person is far better off in one of those countries than he is in the United States and poverty of the sort that we have is absolutely unknown in Northern Europe.