In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.

You notice how liberals keep saying, ‚If only Islam would have a Reformation‘ – it can’t have one. It says it can’t. It’s extremely dangerous in that way.

The most practical kind of politics is the politics of decency.

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do – and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

I was married a few times, and one of my husbands was jealous of me writing.

History should be written as philosophy.

I might just write a novel next. I don’t know!

When I write, I tend to twist my hair. Something for my small mind to do, I guess.

It seems strange that bears, so fond of all sorts of flesh, running the risks of guns and fires and poison, should never attack men except in defense of their young. How easily and safely a bear could pick us up as we lie asleep! Only wolves and tigers seem to have learned to hunt man for food, and perhaps sharks and crocodiles.

My own books drive themselves. I know roughly where a book is going to end, but essentially the story develops under my fingers. It’s just a matter of joining the dots.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

All respect for the office of the presidency aside, I assumed that the obvious and unadulterated decline of freedom and constitutional sovereignty, not to mention the efforts to curb the power of judicial review, spoke for itself.

The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.

If you’re sick and tired of the politics of cynicism and polls and principles, come and join this campaign.

When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.

‚Obama and Biden want to raise taxes by a trillion dollars.‘ Guess what? Yes, we do in one regard: We want to let that trillion dollar tax cut expire so the middle class doesn’t have to bear the burden of all that money going to the super-wealthy. That’s not a tax raise. That’s called fairness where I come from.

A President needs political understanding to run the government, but he may be elected without it.

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.

There is no act of treachery or meanness of which a political party is not capable; for in politics there is no honour.

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.

The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it.

There’s some jerks. There’s some big egos. There are a few that think they’re one of the Founding Fathers… in both parties.

I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast – talk them or write them down.

Working with a guy like Ice Cube on ‚Ride Along,‘ you learn so much. He’s a guy who produces, writes, and directs, so you watch and learn and ask questions. As you go, you learn and figure out what you should and shouldn’t do. I do nothing but soak up information.

I seem to smell the stench of appeasement in the air.

Anything popular is populist, and populist is rarely a good adjective.

What I’m asking for is hard. It’s easier to be cynical; to accept that change isn’t possible, and politics is hopeless, and to believe that our voices and actions don’t matter. But if we give up now, then we forsake a better future.

The more people who are dependent on government handouts, the more votes the left can depend on for an ever-expanding welfare state.

In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.

There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted.

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

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.

Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

I really wish I knew what I was doing because I’d be writing hit songs every minute.

Part of the problem is there are people in Washington, D.C. in positions of power to whom the border is just a nuisance, and I think some of them believe that illegal immigration is a moral good. It is not. It undermines legal immigration.

Many things shall change in Cuba, but they shall change because of our efforts and despite the United States. Perhaps that empire shall crumble first.

There were the questions of what kind of First Lady I would be, what issues would I focus on. Those were the questions that were being pounded on me through the campaign. A lot of times, I wondered what in the world Barack was even getting us into.

It is the duty of the President to propose and it is the privilege of the Congress to dispose.

I’ve always written. There’s a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother’s papers were destroyed. I’d written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.

The truth of the matter is that Iran is a cancer.

Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us. The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a President and senators and congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this country.

The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.

Only a liberal senator from Massachusetts would say that a 49 percent increase in funding for education was not enough.

I was brought up to try to see what was wrong and right it. Since I am a writer, writing is how I right it.

For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.

I loved being Secretary of State, that’s probably evident to everyone who watched me.

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

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

Most of the problems a President has to face have their roots in the past.

I had my jazz club and I had enough money. So I didn’t have to write for my living.

No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

Politics has become so expensive that it takes a lot of money even to be defeated.

The President is always abused. If he isn’t, he isn’t doing anything.

The moment I said I’d finished a book, I knew what would happen. There would be a bidding war, and I would end up with someone who’d got the fattest wallet, who had bought it because I’d written Harry Potter. That would have been why.

I think where political issues invade moral situations, spiritual leaders have to speak out.

I would remind you the lesser of two socialists is still a socialist.

I believe we can continue the Great Society while we fight in Vietnam.

Capitalism is using its money; we socialists throw it away.