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

On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.

I went to Europe to live in 1961. I'd never have written Julian if it hadn't been for the sequestered life that I led in Rome and the classical library at the America Academy.

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.

Realism has always been called cynicism.

A huge number of Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. You have a people that don't know anything about the rest of the world, and you have leaders who lie to them, lie to them, and lie to them.

For the average American, freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more.