Under the rules of a society that cannot distinguish between profit and profiteering, between money defined as necessity and money defined as luxury, murder is occasionally obligatory and always permissible.

Of what does politics consist except the making of imperfect decisions, many of them unjust and quite a few of them deadly?

America is about class. To pretend that it isn't is very ignorant. No society has ever existed without some kind of a ruling class.

Never in the history of the world have so many people been so rich; never in the history of the world have so many of those same people felt themselves so poor.

Label celebrity a consumer society's most precious consumer product, and eventually it becomes the hero with a thousand faces, the packaging of the society's art and politics, the framework of its commerce, and the stuff of its religion.

Construed as a means instead of an end, history is the weapon with which we defend the future against the past.

More than illness or death, the American journalist fears standing alone against the whim of his owners or the prejudices of his audience. Deprive William Safire of the insignia of the New York Times, and he would have a hard time selling his truths to a weekly broadsheet in suburban Duluth.