The barbarian weapon is fission: the splitting asunder. It has been perfected for death. Our only weapon is fusion: an imperfect process still, though designed for life.

Nobody objects to a woman being a good writer or sculptor or geneticist if at the same time she manages to be a good wife, a good mother, good-looking, good-tempered, well-dressed, well-groomed, and unaggressive.

fear has always been a diminisher of life. Whether bred in the bogs of superstition or clothed in the brocades of dogma and ritual, the specter of death has reduced the living to supplicants, powerless.

The curse of the romantic is a greed for dreams, an intensity of expectation that, in the end, diminishes the reality.

The suppression of civil liberties is too many less a matter for horror than the curtailment of the freedom to profit.

In our society those who are in reality superior in intelligence can be accepted by their fellows only if they pretend they are not.

The New York voice reflects its diversity, its foreignness, and, inevitably, the sense of superiority New Yorkers feel or come to feel. It says, without saying, We Know.