I could not do what I do, and teach a class, and never miss a deadline, never be late for anything if I was a lush, OK? I would really love to read a piece that said, ‘He is not a lush.’ That would be fabulous, it would be a first, I could show it to people and say, ‘Look!’
Nothing could make me forget what the Reagan years had actually been like.
High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.
Solidarity is an attitude of resistance, I suppose, or it should be.
I became a journalist partly so that I wouldn’t ever have to rely on the press for my information.
In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them.
I don’t think souls or bodies can be changed by incantation. Or anything else by the way.
I’m terrified of losing my voice.
When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.
Trust is not the same as faith. A friend is someone you trust. Putting faith in anyone is a mistake.
If I’m in a political argument, I think I can, with reasonable accuracy and without boasting, put the other person’s side of the case at least as well as they could. One has to be able to say that in any well-conducted argument.
I vote and I do jury duty.
I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read – if not indeed write – the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?
I’m here as a product of process of evolution, which doesn’t make very many exceptions. And which rates life relatively cheaply.
I’m not particularly a feminist, but if you get women off the animal cycle of reproduction and give them some say in how many children they’ll have, immediately the floor will rise.
Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they’d both unite against an invasion from Mars.
A lot of people, because of my contempt for the false consolations of religion, think of me as a symbolic public opponent of that in extremis. And sometimes that makes me feel a bit alarmed, to be the repository of other people’s hope.
When you hear people demanding that the Ten Commandments be displayed in courtrooms and schoolrooms, always be sure to ask which set. It works every time.
Of course, I do everything for money.
The Koran shows every sign of being thrown together by human beings, as do all the other holy books.
It’s impossible, I think, however much I’d become disillusioned politically or evolve into a post-political person, I don’t think I’d ever change my view that socialism is the best political moment humans have ever come up with.
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