Great Throughts Treasury

"It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us."

"It is vice to go to bed with someone you are not married to or have someone of your own sex or to get money for having sex with someone who does not appeal to you - incidentally, the basis of half the marriages of my generation."

"It is reasonable to assume that, by and large, what is not read now will not be read, ever. It is also reasonable to assume that practically nothing that is read now will be read later. Finally, it is not too farfetched to imagine a future in which novels are not read at all."

"I've developed a total loathing for McCain, conceited little asshole. And he thinks he's wonderful. I mean, you can just tell, this little simper of self-love that he does all the time. You just want to kick him."

"Jackie would go around telling people she was an inquiring photographer and she was my sister. I said, ‘She’s my half sister’s stepsister.’"

"It makes no difference who you vote for - the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people."

"It's not enough to succeed. Others must fail."

"Laughing at someone else is an excellent way of learning how to laugh at oneself; and questioning what seem to be the absurd beliefs of another group is a good way of recognizing the potential absurdity of many of one's own cherished beliefs."

"Least said, soonest mended."

"Lennon was somebody who was a born enemy of those who govern the United States. He was everything they hated. So I just say that he represented life, and is admirable; and Mr. Nixon and Mr. Bush represent death, and that is a bad thing."

"Literature in the written sense represents the triumph of language over writing: the subversion of writing for purposes that have little or nothing to do with social and economic control."

"Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age."

"'Liberal' comes from the Latin liberalis, which means pertaining to a free man. In politics, to be liberal is to want to extend democracy through change and reform. One can see why the word had to be erased from our political lexicon."

"Life will be wonderful when men no longer fear dying. When the last superstitions are thrown out and we meet death with the same equanimity as life. No longer will children's minds be twisted by evil gods whose fantastic origin is in those barbaric tribes who feared death and lightning, who feared life. That's it: life is the villain to to those who preach reward in death, through grace and eternal bliss, or through dark revenge."

"Lonely children often have imaginary playmates but I was never lonely; rather, I was solitary, and wanted no company at all other than books and movies, and my own imagination."

"Love and hate are so confused in your savage minds and the vibrations of the one are so very like those of the other that I can't always distinguish. You see, we neither love nor hate in my world. We simply have hobbies."

"Love is not my bag."

"Little Bush says we are at war, but we are not at war because to beat war Congress has to vote for it. He says we are at war on terror,but that is a metaphor, though I doubt if he knows what that means.It's like having a war on dandruff, it's endless and pointless."

"Love is a fan club with only two fans."

"Love it or loathe it, you can never leave it or lose it."

"Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made."

"Mardonius was more fond of me than I was of him. That always gives one an advantage."

"Monotheism is easily the greatest disaster to befall the human race."

"Must one have a heart of stone to read The Ballad of Reading Gaol without laughing? (In life, practically no one ever gets to kill the thing he hates, much less loves.) And did not De Profundis plumb for all time the shallows of the most reported love affair of the past hundred years, rivalling even that of Wallis and David, its every nuance (O Bosie!) known to all, while trembling rosy lips yet form, over and over again, those doom-laden syllables The Cadogan Hotel? Oscar Wilde. Yet again. Why?"

"Miss Rand now tells us that what we have thought was right is really wrong. The lesson should have read: One for one and none for all."

"My father had a deep and lifelong contempt for politicians in general "They tell lies," he used to say with wonder, "even when they don't have to"."

"Most lives are spent putting on and taking off masks."

"My general response to boarding school was: anything to get away from that fucking mother of mine. She was a monster."

"My grandfather, the Senator [power broker Thomas Gore of Oklahoma], he was magnificent. He loathed the human race. He was extraordinary. He always said if there was another race, he would join it. And his grandson inherited much of his philosophy."

"My family helped start [this country], we've been in political life ... since the 1690s, and I have a very possessive sense about this country."

"Never have children, only grandchildren."

"Never offend an enemy in a small way."

"Never pass up a chance to have sex or appear on television."

"No one can ever love us quite so much as we love ourselves."

"Nonprofit status is what created the Bible Belt. The tax code brought religion back to this country."

"Nothing that Shakespeare ever invented was to equal Lincoln's invention of himself and, in the process, us."

"Next to 'I win,' 'I told you so' are the sweetest words."

"Nothing that ever was changes. Yet nothing that is can ever be the same as what went before."

"No good deed goes unpunished."

"Now you have people in Washington who have no interest in the country at all. They're interested in their companies, their corporations grabbing Caspian oil."

"Nothing human is finally calculable; even to ourselves we are strange."

"Of course his dust would be absorbed in other living things and to that degree at least he would exist again, though it was plain enough that the specific combination which was he would never exist again."

"Of course, it is possible for any citizen with time to spare, and a canny eye, to work out what is actually going on, but for the many there is not time, and the network news is the only news even though it may not be news at all but only a series of flashing fictions..."

"On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died."

"On September , when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died."

"On Jack Kennedy: [He was] very, very funny....He was droll about himself. God knows he was droll about the family. He saw through them all, including Bobby....He should have been a journalist. In fact, he would have been a very good one, a gossip columnist. He knew who was f--king everyone on earth at every given moment. He had an absolute passion to know those details."

"One is sorry one could not have taken both branches of the road. But we were not allotted multiple selves."

"Our only political party has two right wings, one called Republican, the other Democratic. But Henry Adams figured all that out back in the 1890s. “We have a single system," he wrote, and “in that system the only question is the price at which the proletariat is to be bought and sold, the bread and circuses."

"One's neighbor is always the enemy. That is the nature of things."

"Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale."