Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.

People won’t have time for you if you are always angry or complaining.

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.

I think a lot of things that are the norm, that are very systematic, don’t work.

It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.

Demographics show that we are entering a battle between young and old. I call it the ‚Age War.‘ The young want to hang onto their money to grow their families, businesses, and wealth. The old want the tax and investment dollars of the young to sustain their old age.

I think the notion that we have all the democracy that money can buy strays so far from what our democracy is supposed to be.

Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

Hermits have no peer pressure.

I don’t carry the burden of the past or the madness of the future. I live in the present.

I really thought I was on the way out. My husband Blake saved my life. Often I don’t know what I do, then the next day the memory returns. And then I am engulfed in shame.

I think I hate cynicism more than anything else. It’s the curse of our age, and I want to avoid it at all costs.

Governments don’t control people like they used to.

In so far as the mind is stronger than the body, so are the ills contracted by the mind more severe than those contracted by the body.

Where the senses fail us, reason must step in.

I’m crazy, but I’m not too crazy.

Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death.

The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.

When your soul is resting, your emotions are okay, your mind is okay, and your will is at peace with God, not resisting what He’s doing.

If it weren’t for painting, I wouldn’t live; I couldn’t bear the extra strain of things.

‚Fame‘ exhausts me.

There’s an urgent need to stop reacting to each immediate vexing issue in isolation. Such response often creates unanticipated second-order effects and even more problems for us.

Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think.

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

Our single most important challenge is therefore to help establish a social order in which the freedom of the individual will truly mean the freedom of the individual.

For my part, I desire to see the time when education – and by its means, morality, sobriety, enterprise and industry – shall become much more general than at present, and should be gratified to have it in my power to contribute something to the advancement of any measure which might have a tendency to accelerate the happy period.

All of the people in my life whom I consider to be close friends or colleagues are good thinkers.

Both free speech rights and property rights belong legally to individuals, but their real function is social, to benefit vast numbers of people who do not themselves exercise these rights.

I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.

I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.

The walls we build around us to keep sadness out also keeps out the joy.

I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.

Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

When you get angry, your options narrow.

A subtle thought that is in error may yet give rise to fruitful inquiry that can establish truths of great value.

What I want for my fans and for the world, for anyone who feels pain, is to lean into that pain and embrace it as much as they can and begin the healing process.

Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark, raving mad.

Someday, the capitalist system will disappear in the United States, because no social class system has been eternal. One day, class societies will disappear.

Children are all foreigners.

Worry – a God, invisible but omnipotent. It steals the bloom from the cheek and lightness from the pulse; it takes away the appetite, and turns the hair gray.

The public is a ferocious beast; one must either chain it or flee from it.

Those who know how to think need no teachers.

Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob.

The darkness, the loop of negative thoughts on repeat, clamours and interferes with the music I hear in my head.

Pound’s crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don’t put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.

There is nothing that wastes the body like worry, and one who has any faith in God should be ashamed to worry about anything whatsoever.

Good men must not obey the laws too well.

To hold an idea and convince ourselves we arrived at it rationally, we go in search of evidence to support our view.

I think that’s why I put my energy into making music. That’s how I get my thoughts out, instead of being crazy all the time.

Keeping an active mind has been vital to my survival, as has been maintaining a sense of humor.

We humans have lost the wisdom of genuinely resting and relaxing. We worry too much. We don’t allow our bodies to heal, and we don’t allow our minds and hearts to heal.

The society in ‚The Handmaid’s Tale‘ is a throwback to the early Puritans whom I studied extensively at Harvard under Perry Miller, to whom the book is dedicated.

People are just afraid of things too much. Afraid of things that don’t necessarily merit fear.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor.

We all get weary sometimes, and we tend to think that life is what makes us weary.

There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race, and finish the farce.

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses.