It is of no consequence to you what others think of you. What matters is what you think of them. That is how you live your life.

a writer must always tell the truth (unless he's a journalist)

The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.

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.

Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age.

The people are not stupid, but they are totally misinformed.

It is difficult to find a reputable American historian who will acknowledge the crude fact that a Franklin Roosevelt, say, wanted to be President merely to wield power, to be famed and to be feared. To learn this simple fact one must wade through a sea of evasions: history as sociology, leaders as teachers, bland benevolence as a motive force, when, finally, power is an end to itself, and the instinctive urge to prevail the most important single human trait, the necessary force without which no city was built, no city destroyed.