Great Throughts Treasury

"Celebrity is the religion of our time."

"The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for."

"Celebrity distorts democracy by giving the rich, beautiful, and famous more authority than they deserve."

"Wooing the press is an exercise roughly akin to picnicking with a tiger. You might enjoy the meal, but the tiger always eats last."

"Military guys are rarely as smart as they think they are, and they've never gotten over the fact that civilians run the military."

"A French psychologist was hired by the American car manufacturers to justify why they didn't go green earlier.. .why they kept making those huge SUVs, pickup trucks and Hummers long after they should have realized these brands was not really where we needed to go.... He asserted -a reptilian part of the brain seeks tools of survival, especially when the United States remains under threat of attack...You don't want to go to war in a little Pinto. That's where their head was."

"Americans want to be protected, but not at the cost of vitiating the values that make us Americans."

"And as far as doing God's work, I think the bankers who took government money and then gave out obscene bonuses are the same self-interested sorts Jesus threw out of the temple."

"As Steinem stood outside, Lindsay Lohan was inside the party, gushing over the possibility that she could get to wear one of the big rocks."

"Afghanistan is more than the 'graveyard of empires.' It's the mother of vicious circles."

"As blue chips turn into penny stocks, Wall Street seems less like a symbol of America's macho capitalism and more like that famous Jane Austen character Mrs. Bennet, a flibbertigibbet always anxious about getting richer and her 'poor nerves.'"

"American women are evolving backward--becoming more focused on their looks than ever. Feminism has been defeated by narcissism."

"As a woman, I know that if I write about another woman, it will be perceived as a catfight."

"Asked by reporters about the Bushmen controversy, she shrugged it off: I don't get involved in any drama."

"Aside from his scintilla of candor, Mr. Bush is still not leveling with us. As he said at his press conference on Monday, 'the enemies of freedom' know that 'a democratic Iraq will be a decisive blow to their ambitions because free people will never choose to live in tyranny.' They may choose to live in a theocracy, though. Americans did."

"Everybody is continuously connected to everybody else on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, on Reddit, e-mailing, texting, faster and faster, with the flood of information jeopardizing meaning. Everybody's talking at once in a hypnotic, hyper din: the cocktail party from hell."

"Digital platforms are worthless without content. They're shiny sacks with bells and whistles, but without content, they're empty sacks. It is not about pixels versus print. It is not about how you're reading. It is about what you're reading."

"For two centuries, the South has feared a takeover by blacks or the feds. In Obama, they have both."

"Eric Schmidt looks innocent enough, with his watercolor blue eyes and his tiny office full of toys and his Google campus stocked with volleyball courts and unlocked bikes and wheat-grass shots and cereal dispensers and Haribo Gummi Bears and heated toilet seats and herb gardens and parking lots with cords hanging to plug in electric cars."

"He exists in the public mind as bits and pieces of his characters-Butch Cassidy's charm, Ben Quick's machismo, Cool Hand Luke's defiance, Harper's irony, Hud's disdain."

"F.D.R. achieved greatness not by means of imposing his temperament and intellect on the world but by reacting to what the world threw at him."

"I find having a column a very difficult form of journalism. I'm not a natural like Tom Friedman and Anna Quindlen."

"I don't understand men. I don't even understand what I don't understand about men."

"I feel like I owe it to the readers to try to pull back the veil and give them the honest version of what's going on. But it's not more fun. If Obama, as he does sometimes already, gets a little snippy with me about something I've written, you're thinking, 'Oh God, the president of the United States is already annoyed with me.'"

"His House colleagues still call him "Jackie One Note"-joking that if you ask him how to solve the problem of teenage pregnancy, he'll tell you to cut taxes."

"I never presume to give advice on writing. I think the best way to learn to write is to read books and stories by blood writers. It's a hard thing to preach about. As Thelonious Monk once said about his field, "Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.?"

"In a scene that might be called ?Murder on the Oval Express,? Rummy turned up dead with so many knives in him that it?s impossible to say who actually finished off the man billed as Washington?s most skilled infighter."

"If there's one thing white men have never had a problem with in this clubby, white marble enclave of Washington, it's getting pulled up the ladder by other men."

"If Americans are worried about money in politics, there is no larger concern than the Clintons, who are cosseted in a world where rich people endlessly scratch the backs of rich people."

"It is men's worst fear, personally and professionally, that women will pin the sin on them."

"I'm into clothes, but in a way that's related to wanting to walk into a film noir movie. You know, I love to go to vintage stores, but mostly it's stuff that I don't have anywhere to wear... I don't have the life that goes with the clothes."

"It's passing strange that Obama, carried to a second term by women, blacks and Latinos, chooses to give away the plumiest Cabinet and White House jobs to white dudes."

"It takes a lot of adrenaline and fear to make me actually write."

"Instead of broadening the choices of how to look good, we have only broadened the ways we try to look alike. Women are headed toward one face, one body and one expression."

"Journalism, spooked by rumors of its own obsolescence, has stopped believing in itself. Groans of doom alternate with panicked happy talk."

"Materialism has defeated feminism as well. In a sign of the times, Gloria Steinem was on the picket line when the first American DeBeers store opened on Fifth Avenue in June 2005, protesting the evictions of Bushmen in Botswana to make room for diamond miners and the charges that the company dealt in blood diamonds used to finance civil wars in Africa. Her presence meant nothing to young Hollywood beauties who are pleased to shill for the diamond industry in magazine layouts and personal appearances."

"McChrystal never should have been hired for this job given the outrageous cover-up he participated in after the friendly fire death of Pat Tillman. He was lucky to keep the job after his 'Seven Days in May' stunt in London last year when he openly lobbied and undercut the president on the surge. But with the latest sassing, and the continued Sisyphean nature of the surge he urged, McChrystal should offer his resignation. He should try subordination for a change."

"McChrystal's defenders at the Pentagon were making the case Tuesday that the president and his men?(the McChrystal snipers spared Hillary)?must put aside their hurt feelings about being painted as weak sisters. Obama should not fire the serially insubordinate general, they reasoned, because that would undermine the mission in Afghanistan, and if that happens, then Obama would be further weakened. So the commander in chief can be bad-mouthed as weak by the military but then he can't punish the military because that would make him weak? It's the same sort of pass-the-Advil vicious circle reasoning the military always uses."

"My eating habits were so bad for many years that I didn't actually know the intricacies of making a salad."

"My mom long ago advised me, when I was feeling blue or self-doubting about men, that the best thing to do was go out and buy a red lipstick or a red dress. 'It will be your red badge of courage,' she said."

"Never write anything down, and never throw away anything that other people have written down."

"Never confuse networking with affection."

"Obama invented himself against all odds and repeated parental abandonment, and he worked hard to regiment his emotions. But now that can come across as imperviousness and inflexibility. He wants to run the agenda; he doesn't want the agenda to run him. Once you become president, though, there's no way to predict what your crises will be."

"OK, I'll predict that the rapture's coming and you and I, Chris, are going up, and all these hypocritical conservatives who tell people not to do stuff but then they get caught doing are not."

"Obama sees himself as such a huge change that he can be cautious about other societal changes. But what he doesn't realize is that legalizing gay marriage is like electing a black president. Before you do it, it seems inconceivable. Once it's done, you can't remember what all the fuss was about."

"One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly."

"Obama hates selling. He thinks people should just accept the right thing to do."

"Romantic googling can be as dangerous as drunk text messaging. Of course hell hath no fury like a woman who Google-bombs her old flames name with a word like impotent."

"President Obama thinks he can use emotion to bring pressure on Congress. But that's not how adults with power respond to things."

"Reagan didn't socialize with the press. He spent his evenings with Nancy, watching TV with dinner trays. But he knew that to transcend, you can't condescend."