Drugs. If they did not exist our governors would have invented them in order to prohibit them and so make much of the population vulnerable to arrest, imprisonment, seizure of property, and so on.

What we are is seldom what we want to be, while what we want to be is either denied us or changes with the seasons.

The New York Times is the worst in that hardly anybody can write English over there. Most of it reads like slight translations from the German.

Memory is strange. Scientifically, it is not a mechanical means of repeating something. I can think a thousand times about when I broke my leg at the age of ten, but it is never the same thing which comes to mind when I think about it. My memory of this event has never been, in reality, anything except the memory of my last memory of that event. This is why I use the image of a palimpsest - something written over something partially erased - that is what memory is for me. It's not a film you play back in exactly the same way. It's like theater, with characters who appear from time to time.

I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam - good people, yes, but any religion based on a single...

At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation, and prejudice.

There's a lot to be said for being nouveau riche, and the Reagans mean to say it all.