Considering our backgrounds, I found it a strange irony that Ian and I should meet in central Borneo. Both of us were set in motion by the war in Southeast Asia. Ian enlisted. I left...

I know the police cause you troubleThey cause trouble everywhereBut when you die and go to heavenYou find no policeman there

The gods do not protect fools. Fools are protected by more capable fools.

It’s not Americans I find annoying; it’s Americanism: a social disease of the postindustrial world that must inevitably infect each of the mercantile nations in turn, and is called ‘American’ only because your nation is...

The past is dangerous, not least because it cannot go away. It is simply there, never to change, and in its constancy it reflects the eternity of God. It presents to the young mind a...

Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.

So long as governments set the example of killing their enemies, private individuals will occasionally kill theirs.

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd...

Our will is always for our own good, but we do not always see what that is; the people is never corrupted, but it is often deceived…” (Bk2:3)

..the happy hum of humanity.

He was no stranger to compassion: his heart was open to many good impulses, though his rank often prevented their manifestation.

From school desks with inkwells and scratchy nibs on paper to sweaty finger prints on a tablet… technology progression yes… style?

It was mid-November 2008. There were pirates taking ships with impunity in African waters, terrorists punching holes in Indian security, China sinking towards depression because Americans were afraid to buy cheap goods for Christmas, and...

So you’ve been gone a couple days,’ Alison said. ‘Hmm, what’d you miss…A celebrity did drugs. Politicians disagreed. A different celebrity wore a bikini that revealed a bodily imperfection. A team won a sporting event,...

I saw America’s economy last night, people raiding dumpsters at a higher rate than normal in my home town. Digging through garbage shouldn’t be a career. Thanks Democrats. Thanks Republicans.

Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the...

Welcome to Hell. Here’s your accordion.

It’s not oil that runs the world, it’s shame.

I alternate between feeling sympathetic toward humanity and being a misanthrope. When I’m sympathetic, it usually means I haven’t been around people in awhile.

The kind of self-righteous intolerance once associated with the more puritanical forms of religion and the more extreme forms of Socialism now reappeared to promote the ‘rights’ of women, homosexuals, racial minorities, the disabled and...

I know all those words, but that sentence makes no sense to me.

Education…has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.

Jazz is democracy in music.

Put ’em who threaten possessions and power together with ’em who offend our tastes in sex and dope. Those who’re touched, put ’em in asylums. Pack off old ones to ‘senior communities,’ nursing homes. Our...

Events cast their shadows ahead; before a harsh winter, wild animals grow thicker fur, and the beaver puts on a thicker layer of fat. What kind of times and what sort of tasks can lie...

…human history is full of depressing things like colonization, disease, racism, sexism…inventions of things which they had no idea how to handle (the atomic bomb, the Internet, the semicolon)….And through it all there has always...

When it’s better for everyone, it’s better for everyone.

There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul.

…because the great beauty of embryo development, the bit that human beings find so hard to grasp, is that it is a totally decentralised process…no cell need wait for instructions from authority; every cell can...

What interests me, personally, is work which in some way, speaks the truth to power…I don’t think we speak the truth to power for power’s ear, but for the ear and the imagination of future...

Before civilization, artists painted for the living. Today, most paint for a living.

A public outcry usually masks a private obsession.

Sometimes I think I must have a Guardian Idiot. A little invisible spirit just behind my shoulder, looking out for me…only he’s an imbecile.

…all these things were part of the business of dreams. He had learned not to laugh at the advertisements offering to teach writing, cartooning, engineering, to add inches to the biceps and to develop the...

Points of views that are expressed on Twitter don’t intend to offend, but rather defend and open the conversation up to everyone so that no one has to pretend.

Being in prison for seven years was like being in an army that never drilled, never deployed, and only fought itself.

There were certain things that had to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and thoroughly; and one of these, in the old New York code, was the tribal rally around a kinswoman...

If she did not wish to lead a virtuous life, at least she desired to enjoy a character for virtue, and we know that no lady in the genteel world can possess this desideratum, until...

I wrote Unwind for lots of reasons, and it poses questions about alot of subjects. To state it briefly, I wanted to point out how when peopletake intractable positions on an issue, and stick to...

Did you notice there aren’t any average kids anymore—only Gifted and Disposable?

You see man we are just fucking extras!! Extras in a capitalist blockbuster!~page 75

I can’t give you the white picket fence, and if I did, you’d set it on fire.

To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?…There is nobody—here among these grey arches, and moaning pigeons, and cheerful games and tradition and emulation, all so skilfully organised to prevent feeling alone.

Oh, those hateful sods will never make it to Heaven. They’re all on an express elevator to the gay spit-roast dungeon in Hell. Within five minutes of kicking the bucket, they’ll have demon balls swollen...

I love social media. I love the connectivity it provides, the creativity it allows, and the breathtaking wealth of information we all have at our fingertips because of it.

We Greeks believe that a man who takes no part in public affairs is not merely lazy, but good for nothing

When we forget our essential similarities, we forget how to get along, and that cannot but lead to prejudice, discrimination, and eventually, conflict.

Or was he merely a mollycoddled favorite, enjoying capriciously prejudiced love? Schenback was inclined to believe the latter. Inborn in nearly every artist’s nature is a voluptuous, treacherous tendency to accept the injustice if it...

A city’s only ever three hot meals away from anarchy.

Last summer, in London at least, the hoodie was transformed from a benign piece of leisurewear into a uniform for the disaffected, the angry, the malevolent. So much so that ‘hoodie’ was no longer a...