By the age of 9 or 10, I knew that I had to cut my own cloth and make my own way.

There is a terrible alienation in the ordinary man between what he is being told and what he secretly believes.

The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous. But neither, in my experience, do we ever reach a plane of detachment regarding our parents, however wise and old we may become. To pretend otherwise is to cheat.

When the world is destroyed, it will be destroyed not by its madmen but by the sanity of its experts and the superior ignorance of its bureaucrats.

It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.

Elections are a Western jerk-off.

The greatest threat to mankind comes from the renunciation of individual scruple in favor of institutional denominators. . . . Real heroism lies, as it always will, not in conformity or even patriotism, but in acts of solitary moral courage. Which, come to think of it, is what we used to admire in our Christian savior