If Henry Miller often sounded like a village idiot, it is because, like Whitman, he was the rest of the village as well.

Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the teenager was a captive in a hostile world of adults.

I might become an ascetic, live in India. A little rice is about the best I can do now.

Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and that of his delegates on earth. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family at home.

One is sorry one could not have taken both branches of the road. But we were not allotted multiple selves.

France is a nation devoted to the false hypothesis on which it then builds marvelously logical structures.

Democracy is something America has never really practiced. Because the Founding Fathers hated two things: monarchy and democracy. They wanted a republic, a replica of the Roman or Venetian republics. They didn't even like the etymology of the word "democracy."