Writer Quotes

In general, higher education does not know how to speak for its interests. It offers a stance that is defensive, cowardly and likely to be ineffective.

I do not support abortion rights. Although what I would support in this vexed area is not clear to me.

Belief and knowledge are considered to be two different things. But they are not.

Any idea can be brought into the classroom if the point is to inquire into its structure, history, influence and so forth. But no idea belongs in the classroom if the point of introducing it is to recruit your students for the political agenda it may be thought to imply.

It is of no help to us that there is an absolute truth of the matter of things because unfortunately, none of us are in a position to say definitively what that is - although we all think that we are.

I should have known better. Pro-life arguments are now based on scientific evidence and the pro-choice arguments are not. That is a cultural, historical fact.

To provoke dreams of terror in the slumber of prosperity has become the moral duty of literature.

If you can't pay for a thing, don't buy it. If you can't get paid for it, don't sell it. Do this, and you will have calm and drowsy nights, with all of the good business you have now and none of the bad. If you have time, don't wait for time.

As machines become more and more efficient and perfect, so it will become clear that imperfection is the greatness of man.

The bosses of our mass media, press, radio, film and television, succeed in their aim of taking our minds off disaster. Thus, the distraction they offer demands the antidote of maximum concentration on disaster.

I don't want life to imitate art. I want life to be art.

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

The strength of any weakness within us is the degree to which it is feared.

Being fully present is the best guarantee for a bright future.

All things good come to those for whom the Good is all things.

Real change isn't found in some new way to think about yourself, but in freedom from the need to think about yourself at all.

It only seems that there is something more important for you to do than to just quietly be yourself.

The limit of your present understanding is not the limit of your possibilities.

Ultimately we know deeply that the other side of every fear is freedom.

The brain's calculations do not require our conscious effort, only our attention and our openness to let the information through. Although the brain absorbs universes of information, little is admitted into normal consciousness.

Real progress in understanding nature is rarely incremental. All important advances are sudden intuitions, new principles, new ways of seeing.

Over the years your bodies become walking autobiographies, telling friends and strangers alike of the minor and major stresses of your lives.

Fear is a question: What are you afraid of, and why? Just as the seed of health is in illness, because illness contains information, your fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if you explore them.

The greatest revolution in our generation is that of human beings, who by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.

Your past is not your potential. In any hour you can choose to liberate the future.

No one can persuade another to change. Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside. We cannot open the gate of another, either by argument or emotional appeal.

The utter helplessness of a conquered people is perhaps the most tragic feature of a civil war or any other sort of war.

To paraphrase Jane Austen, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a married man in possession of a vast fortune must be in want of a newer, younger wife.

Never settle with words what you can accomplish with a flamethrower.

The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.