Great Throughts Treasury

"In science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality."

"The mark of the historic is the nonchalance with which it picks up an individual and deposits him in a trend, like a house playfully moved in a tornado."

"In violence, we forget who we are, just as we forget who we are when we are engaged in sheer perception."

"Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted."

"There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing. A truth is something that everyone can be shown to know and to have known, as people say, all along."

"Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism."

"Understanding is often a prelude to forgiveness, but they are not the same, and we often forgive what we cannot understand (seeing nothing else to do) and understand what we cannot pardon.”"

"Liberty, as it is conceived by current opinion, has nothing inherent about it; it is a sort of gift or trust bestowed on the individual by the state pending good behavior."

"We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words, you are the hero of your own story."

"People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children."

"Anti-Semitism is a horrible disease from which nobody is immune, and it has a kind of evil fascination that makes an enlightened person draw near the source of infection, supposedly in a scientific spirit, but really to sniff the vapors and dally with the possibility."

"To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics."

"When you have committed an action that you cannot bear to think about, that causes you to writhe in retrospect, do not seek to evade the memory: make yourself relive it, confront it repeatedly over and over, till finally, you will discover, through sheer repetition it loses its power to pain you. It works, I guarantee you, this sure-fire guilt-eradicator, like a homeopathic medicine — like in small doses applied to like. It works, but I am not sure that it is a good thing."

"I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you’re older, I think, is that — how to express this — you really must make the self. It's absolutely useless to look for it, you won’t find it, but it’s possible in some sense to make it."

"A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget."

"An unrectified case of injustice has a terrible way of lingering, restlessly, in the social atmosphere like an unfinished question"

"A society person who is enthusiastic about modern painting or Truman Capote is already half a traitor to his class. It is middle-class people who, quite mistakenly, imagine that a lively pursuit of the latest in reading and painting will advance their status in the world."

"Congress-these, for the most part, illiterate hacks whose fancy vests are spotted with gravy and whose speeches, hypocritical, unctuous and slovenly, are spotted also with the gravy of political patronage."

"Europeans used to say Americans were puritanical. Then they discovered that we were not puritans. So now they say that we are obsessed with sex."

"Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof."

"Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'."

"As happens with sports and hobbies, his enjoyment was solemnized by expertise, the rites of comparing, collating, a half-deliberate parody of scholarship like the recitation of batting averages."

"Being abroad makes you conscious of the whole imitative side of human behavior. The ape in man."

"Calling someone a monster does not make him more guilty; it makes him less so by classing him with beasts and devils."

"Friendship... is essential to intellectuals. You can date the evolving life of a mind, like the age of a tree, by the rings of friendship formed by the expanding central trunk."

"I am putting real plums into an imaginary cake."

"I do not mind if I lose my soul for all eternity. If the kind of God exists Who would damn me for not working out a deal with Him, then that is unfortunate. I should not care to spend eternity in the company of such a person."

"I just know that wherever he is, he knows she's doing well and knows what a powerful impact he had on her? And he's proud of her. She feels a strong conviction to carry on, stay sober and work hard in his memory."

"I kept pouring water over her head."

"I once started a detective story to make money?but I couldn?t get the murder to take place! At the end of three chapters I was still describing the characters and the milieu, so I thought, this is not going to work. No corpse!"

"If [she] had come to prefer the company of odd ducks, it was possibly because they had no conception of oddity, or rather, they thought you were odd if you weren't."

"I was able to compare the sexual equipment of the various men I made love with and there were amazing differences, in both length and massiveness. One handsome married man, who used to arrive with two Danishes from a very good bakery, had a penis about the size and shape of a lead pencil; he shall remain nameless. In my experience there was usually a relation to height, as Philip Rahv and Bill Mangold, both tall men, bore out. There may be dwarfish men with monstrously large organs, but I have never known one. It was not until later, after my second divorce, that I met an impotent man or a pervert (two of the latter)... None of my partners, the reader will be relieved to hear, had a venereal disease."

"I really tried, or so I thought, to avoid lying, but it seemed to me that they forced it on me by the difference in their vision of things, so that I was always transposing reality for them into something they could understand."

"If someone tells you he is going to make "a realistic decision," you immediately understand that he is going to do something bad."

"I'm afraid I'm not sufficiently inhibited about the things that other women are inhibited about for me. They feel that you've given away trade secrets."

"In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons."

"I'm not worried about my ring, or my house, even though it's not insured. I just want to get to my daughter's house in Georgia."

"In verity we are the poor. This humanity we would claim for ourselves is the legacy, not only of the Enlightenment, but of the thousands and thousands of European peasants and poor townspeople who came here bringing their humanity and their sufferings with them. It is the absence of a stable upper class that is responsible for much of the vulgarity of the American scene. Should we blush before the visitor for this deficiency?"

"Is it really so difficult to tell a good action from a bad one? I think one usually knows right away or a moment afterward, in a horrid flash of regret."

"It has to be acknowledged that in capitalist society, with its herds of hippies, originality has become a sort of fringe benefit, a mere convention, accepted obsolescence, the Beatnik model being turned in for the Hippie model, as though strangely obedient to capitalist laws of marketing."

"It really seems to me sometimes that the only hope is space. That is to say, perhaps the most energetic?in a bad sense?elements will move on to a new world in space. The problems of mass society will be transported into space, leaving behind this world as a kind of Europe, which then eventually tourists will visit. The Old World. I?m only half joking."

"It was getting rather alarming. I realized one day that in twenty four hours I had slept with three different men. And one morning I was in bed with somebody while over his head I talked on the telephone with somebody else? I did not feel promiscuous. Maybe no-one does. And maybe more girls sleep with more men than you would ever think to look at them."

"Life is a system of recurrent pairs, the poison and the antidote being eternally packaged together by some considerate heavenly druggist."

"Life for the European is a career; for the American it is a hazard."

"Our mission is to provide legal services to impoverished individuals, and advance the rights and protections of the immigrant population."

"Our anti-Communism came to us neither as the fruit of a special wisdom nor as a humiliating awakening from a prolonged deception, but as a natural event, the product of chance and propinquity. One thing followed another, and the will had little to say about it. For my part, during that year, I realized, with a certain wistfulness, that it was too late for me to become any kind of Marxist. Marxism, I saw, from the learned young man I listened to at Committee meetings, was something you had to take up young, like ballet dancing."

"Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished, or if it does, as in the case of the tilled field, this product of human activity requires still more labor, incessant, tireless labor, to maintain its identity as a "work" of man."

"The American character looks always as if it had just had a rather bad haircut, which gives it, in our eyes at any rate, a greater humanity than the European, which even among its beggars has an all too professional air."

"The American, if he has a spark of national feeling, will be humiliated by the very prospect of a foreigner's visit to Congress -- these, for the most part, illiterate hacks whose fancy vests are spotted with gravy, and whose speeches, hypocritical, unctuous, and slovenly, are spotted also with the gravy of political patronage, these persons are a reflection on the democratic process rather than of it; they expose it in its process rather than of it; they expose it in its underwear."

"She considered [her] life, which had not been a life but only a sort of greeting, a Hello There."