The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.

Laws aren't ghosts in this country, they walk around with the smell of earth on them.

Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.

Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight; it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear.

What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?

Money is like water in a leaky bucket: no sooner there, it begins to drip.

Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.