In beloved Iraq, blood is flowing between brothers, in the shadow of an illegitimate foreign occupation, and abhorrent sectarianism threatens a civil war.
They are preserving the sanctity of marriage, so that two gay men who’ve been together for twenty-five years can’t get married, but a guy can still get drunk in Vegas and marry a hooker at the Elvis chapel! The sanctity of marriage is saved!
All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them.
Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke . . . She will need her sisterhood.
Much good work is lost for the lack of a little more.
I’ve had no sexual education, but I have six children.
Finally, from what we now know about the cosmos, to think that all this was created for just one species among the tens of millions of species who live on one planet circling one of a couple of hundred billion stars that are located in one galaxy among hundreds of billions of galaxies, all of which are in one universe among perhaps an infinite number of universes all nestled within a grand cosmic multiverse, is provincially insular and anthropocentrically blinkered. Which is more likely? That the universe was designed just for us, or that we the universe as having been designed just for us?
The most important of my discoveries have been suggested to me by my failures.
Beneath the makeup and behind the smile I am just a girl who wishes for the world.
When time passes, it’s the people who knew you whom you want to see; they’re the ones you can talk to. When enough time passes, what’s it matter what they did to you?
We women of America tell you that America is not a democracy. Twenty million women are denied the right to vote.
I learned a lot about morality from fiction, from movies.
What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man.
We are graced with a godlike ability to transcend time and space in our minds but are chained to death.
The European talks of progress because by the aid of a few scientific discoveries he has established a society which has mistaken comfort for civilisation.
Standards of conduct appropriate to civil society or the workings of a democracy cannot be purely and simply applied to the Church.
If you will investigate all the Indian troubles, you will find that there is something wrong of this nature at the bottom of all of them, something relating to the supplies, or else a tardy and broken faith on the part of the general government.
Happiness? A good cigar, a good meal, a good cigar and a good woman – or a bad woman; it depends on how much happiness you can handle.
Public life is a situation of power and energy; he trespasses against his duty who sleeps upon his watch, as well as he that goes over to the enemy.
I started at the age of 8 and have been lucky to be still working.
SOME YEARS, like some poets,and politicians and some lovely women, are singled out for fame far beyond the common lot, and 1929 was clearly such a year.
People talk a lot about all the homosexuals there are to see in Greenwich Village, but it was all the neuters that caught my eye that day. These were my people — as used as I was to wanting love from nowhere, as certain as I was that almost anything desirable was likely to be booby-trapped.
So what indeed! The lesson I myself learned over and over again when teaching at the college and then the prison was the uselessness of information to most people, except as entertainment. If facts weren’t funny or scary, or couldn’t make you rich, the heck with them.
No man is truly great, who is great only in his life time. The test of greatness is the page of history.
In our story logic which we’re making up, if we’re saying he’s alive, then like a quadriplegic who’s in bed he can move his head and shoulders, but he can’t move his arms. If he could just turn on that power to his legs and arms, the nerves could get through and he could walk.