The reactionary is always willing to take a progressive attitude on any issue that is dead.

There’s a tremendous gap between public opinion and public policy.

Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity.

There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.

Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions.

Certainly, if you look at human behavior around the world, you have to admit that we can be very aggressive.

It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.

President Obama is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.

For all right judgment of any man or things it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.

I have been struck again and again by how important measurement is to improving the human condition.

Biography lends to death a new terror.

Wit is the epitaph of an emotion.

All genuinely intellectual work is humorous.

If anyone offers conjectures about the truth of things from the mere possibility of hypotheses, I do not see by what stipulation anything certain can be determined in any science, since one or another set of hypotheses may always be devised which will appear to supply new difficulties.

A critic should be taught to criticise a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author.

Worth seeing? Yes; but not worth going to see.

The American temptation is to believe that foreign policy is a subdivision of psychiatry.

There is nothing in which people more betray their character than in what they laugh at.

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

I believe the Republicans have never thought that democracy was anything but a tribal myth.

To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well.

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

I’m not concerned about all hell breaking loose, but that a PART of hell will break loose… it’ll be much harder to detect.

I read the book of Job last night, I don’t think God comes out well in it.

Time, which alone makes the reputation of men, ends by making their defects respectable.

I don’t usually admire Sarah Palin, but when she was making fun of this ‚hopey changey stuff,‘ she was right: there was nothing there.

Characters do not change. Opinions alter, but characters are only developed.

The false is nothing but an imitation of the true.

In the last analysis, even the best man is evil: in the last analysis, even the best woman is bad.

An economist’s guess is liable to be as good as anybody else’s.

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.

Trying to be fascinating is an asinine position to be in.

It’s not simply to say, ‚My colleagues are wrong, and I would do it this way,‘ but the greatest dissents do become court opinions.

‚I am‘ is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language. Could it be that ‚I do‘ is the longest sentence?

Realists do not fear the results of their study.

What we achieved was a nuclear pause, not a nuclear halt.

But if you – if what – the reports are true, what they’re saying is, is that as a consequence of us getting 30 million additional people health care, at the margins that’s going to increase our costs, we knew that.

So foul and fair a day I have not seen.

Stupidity is a talent for misconception.

Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side.

Issues are never simple. One thing I’m proud of is that very rarely will you hear me simplify the issues.

His lack of education is more than compensated for by his keenly developed moral bankruptcy.

Over grown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.

If you judge, investigate.

It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.

Now is the winter of our discontent.

Perhaps there are none more lazy, or more truly ignorant, than your everlasting readers.

If you look at ‚Blade Runner,‘ it’s been cut sixteen ways from Sunday, and there are all kinds of different versions of it.

I don’t think the intelligence reports are all that hot. Some days I get more out of the New York Times.

‚Tis best to weigh the enemy more mighty than he seems.

Humor is the most engaging cowardice.

Thinking fragments reality – it cuts it up into conceptual bits and pieces.

A true critic ought to dwell upon excellencies rather than imperfections, to discover the concealed beauties of a writer, and communicate to the world such things as are worth their observation.

We dissect failure a lot more than we dissect success.

It is in the treatment of trifles that a person shows what they are.

Analysis is like a lobotomy. Who wants to have all their edges shaved off?

Study men, not historians.

Politics… have always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

What do I think of Western civilization? I think it would be a very good idea.

Politics I supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.

Romcoms are hard in a lot of ways: they’re built to be buoyant. It’s easy to demean them.