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

Anti-utopianism continues to suffuse our culture...Today few imagine that society can be fundamentally improved, and those who do are seen as at best deluded, at worst threatening.

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.

We might make a public moan in the newspapers about the decay of conscience, but in private conversation, no matter what crimes a man may have committed or how cynically he may have debased his talent or his friends, variations on the answer Yes, but I did it for the money, satisfy all but the most tiresome objections.

I never can pass by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York without thinking of it not as a gallery of living portraits but as a cemetery of tax-deductible wealth.

The leading cause of death is birth.

If you wear a suit, you can talk to anybody.