It is, I think, an error to believe that there is any need of religion to make life seem worth living.

When fascism comes to the United States it will be wrapped in the American flag and will claim the name of 100-percent Americanism

When audiences come to see us authors lecture, it is largely in the hope that we'll be funnier to look at than to read.

Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.

There is no greater compliment to the Jews than the fact that the degree of their unpopularity is always the scientific measure of the cruelty and silliness of the regime under which they live.

To a true-blue professor of literature in an American university, literature is not something that a plain human being, living today, painfully sits down to produce. No; it is something dead.

I think perhaps we want a more conscious life. We're tired of drudging and sleeping and dying. We're tired of seeing just a few people able to be individualists. We're tired of always deferring hope till the next generation. We're tired of hearing politicians and priests and cautious reformers... coax us, 'Be calm! Be patient! Wait! We have the plans for a Utopia already made; just wiser than you.' For ten thousand years they've said that. We want our Utopia now — and we're going to try our hands at it.