Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.

Eisenhower managed to begin the Vietnam war by not following his normal instinct of staying out of mischief. In his memoirs, he tells us why we didn't honor the Geneva accords and hold elections in Vietnam: because some 80 percent of the country would have voted for Ho Chi Minh. This is very candid. The sort of thing one might have found in Stalin'smemoirs, had he not made ghosts even of ghosts.

When anyone says to me, 'Can you keep a secret?' I say, 'Why should I, if you can't?'

I was the first - I was extremely unpopular with the establishment of the United States, particularly the New York Times was always an enemy, and Time magazine, off and on, the enemy, because I said things and took positions that other people didn't do.

I can understand companionship. I can understand bought sex in the afternoon, but I cannot understand the love affair.

We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.

True wisdom is to know the extent of what you don't know quite as well as you know what you do know.