Leaders make things possible. Exceptional leaders make them inevitable.
Music is the way our memories sing to us across time.
Never forget the power of silence, that massively disconcerting pause which goes on and on and may last induce an opponent to babble and backtrack nervously.
People travel because it teaches them things they could learn no other way.
Not to forgive is to be imprisoned by the past, by old grievances that do not permit life to proceed with new business.
One can live with the thought of one's own death. It is the thought of the death of the words and books that is terrifying for that is the deeper extinction.
The busybodies have begun to infect American society with a nasty intolerance - a zeal to police the private lives of others and hammer them into standard forms - A Nation of Finger Pointers.
Never try to wear a hat that has more character than you do.
The Clinton's secret is that they live in a morally discontinuous universe-events do not have consequences, and what happened 15 minutes ago has no connection to what happens now. Beware of power when it masters the secret of popular amnesia.
For now, we assume that self-evolving robots will learn to mimic human traits, including, eventually, humor. And so, I can't wait to hear the first joke that one robot tells to another robot.
Forgiveness frees the forgiver.
Religious hatreds tend to be merciless and absolute.
A day cannot live in infamy without the nourishment of rage. Let's have rage.
Handwriting is civilization's casual encephalogram.
A rattlesnake loose in the living room tends to end all discussion of animal rights.
As they marched, the crowds lining the route broke into applause, a sweet and deeply felt spontaneous pattering that was a sort of communal embrace. Welcome home.
The real 1960s began on the afternoon of November 22, 1963. It came to seem that Kennedy's murder opened some malign trap door in American culture, and the wild bats flapped out.
Everywhere you hang your hat is home. Home is the bright cave under the hat.
Abstinence is a window of clarity through which one can better find one's work and one's mate.
Human ingenuity has given centuries to the goal of ensuring that the human body might move around at an even 68 degrees all year.
The kiss is a wordless articulation of desire whose object lies in the future, and somewhat to the south.
When man sends colonies into space, he will be able to mount moveable, sun-reflecting mirrors to simulate rhythms of day and night and even the terrestial seasons...But he doubtless will follow the longstanding American habit of thinking that outer space should, as much as possible, resemble Southern California.
Over the years, he [Everett Dirksen] developed a style of infinitely subtle fustian, whose effect can still be remotely approximated by sipping twelve-year-old bourbon, straight, while reading Dickens aloud, in a sort of sepulchral purr.
Walter Duranty helped to turn the monster Stalin into a world figure and a hero of the leftistWestern intelligentsia by defending the bloodbath of the Soviet Union from its critics in the now famous: "You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.
The Church became both more accessible and less imposing. It threw itself open to risk.
