The twentieth century seems afflicted by a gigantic... power failure. Powerlessness and the sense of powerlessness may be the environmental disease of the age.

Notice, for example, that people who talk about "the joys of childhood" are always adults. Only an adult, utterly remote from the reality of childhood, could suppose it is time of joys.

A day spent praising the earth and lamenting man's pollutionist history makes you feel like a superior, sensitive soul.

The American press has the blues. Too many authorities have assured it that its days are numbered, too many good newspapers are in ruins.

Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.

What [man landing on the moon] is doing up there is indulging his obsession with the impossible. The impossible infuriates and tantalizes him. Show him an impossible job and he will reduce it to a possibility so trite that eventually it bores him.

The biographer's problem is that he never knows enough. The autobiographer's problem is that he knows too much.