"We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand."
— Eric Hoffer

"Few would argue against safe-guarding the nation. But in the judgment of at least one of the country's most distinguished presidential scholars, the legal steps taken by the Bush Administration in its war against terrorism were a quantum leap beyond earlier blots on the country's history and traditions: more significant than John Adams' Alien and Sedition Acts, than Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, than the imprisonment of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II. Collectively, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. argued, the Bush Administration's extralegal counter-terrorism program presented the most dramatic, sustained, and radical challenge to the rule of law in American history."
— Jane Mayer (The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals)

"Useless matters and conversations about the same thing took for their share the best part of one's time, the best of one's powers, and what was left in the end was some sort of curtailed, wingless life, some sort of nonsense, and it was impossible to get away or flee, as if you were sitting in a madhouse or a prison camp.
- The Lady with the Little Dog, from My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead"
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"They held the funeral on the second day, with the town coming to look at Miss Emily beneath a mass of bought flowers with the crayon face of her father musing profoundly above the bier and the ladies sibilant and macabre; and the very old men - some in their brushed Confederate uniforms - on the porch and the lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years.
- A Rose for Emily from My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead"
— William Faulkner

"That my lunacy had been recognized was chastening enough, but the judge's gratuitous "fatuous" carried with it intimations that I was in a blubbering, nose-picking state; an I had visions of arriving at my mother's door, garbed not in the "attractive," melancholic dementia of the poet but in the drooling, masturbatory, moony-eyed condition of the Mongoloid."
— Frederick Exley (A Fan's Notes)

"I distrust summaries, any kind of gliding through time, any too great a claim that one is in control of what one recounts; I think someone who claims to understand but who is obviously calm, someone who claims to write with emotion recollected in tranquility, is a fool and a liar. To understand is to tremble. To recollect is to reenter and be riven. An acrobat after spinning through the air in a mockery of flight stands erect on his perch and mockingly takes his bow as if what he is being applauded for was easy for him and cost him nothing, although meanwhile he is covered with sweat and his smile is edged with a relief chilling to think about; he is indulging in a show-business style; he is pretending to be superhuman. I am bored with that and with here it has brought us. I admire the authority of being on one's knees in front of the event.
- Innocence, from My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead"
— Harold Brodkey

"No penance would ever expiate the sin against free government of holding that a President can escape control of executive powers by law through assuming a military role."
— Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. vs. Sawyer, 343 US 579 (1952)

"I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"What's his offense?
Groping for trout in a peculiar river."
— William Shakespeare (Measure for Measure)

"I love America because it is a confused, chaotic mess - and I hope we can keep it this way for at least another thousand years. The permissive society is the free society."
— Edward Abbey

"When you blame others, you give up your power to change."
— Douglas Adams

"Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit."
— Henry Adams

"If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader."
— John Quincy Adams

"To believe all men honest would be folly. To believe none so, is something worse."
— John Quincy Adams

"Neil Armstrong was the first man to walk on the moon. I am the first man to piss his pants on the moon."
— Buzz Aldrin

"We learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself."
— Lloyd Alexander

"I am at two with nature."
— Woody Allen

"Some guy hit my fender the other day, and I said unto him, 'Be fruitful, and multiply'. But not in those words."
— Woody Allen

"The difference between sex and love is that sex relieves tension and love causes it."
— Woody Allen

"The last woman I was in was the Statue of Liberty."
— Woody Allen

"God, you Jews are truly exotic."
Exotic? She should only know the Greenblatts. Or Mr. and Mrs. Milton Sharpstein, my father's friends. Or for that matter, my cousin Tovah. Exotic? I mean, they're nice, but hardly exotic with their endless bickering over the best way to combat indigestion or how far back to sit from the television set."
— Woody Allen (Side Effects)

"Abysmal vermin that I am, I couldn't of course tell her that it was her incredible mother that I wanted to see again… I knew only as I drove through the cold, night autumn air that somewhere Freud, Sophocles and Eugene O’Neill were laughing."
— Woody Allen

"Ads answered out of desperation in the New York Review of Books proved equally futile as…the 'Bay Area Bisexual' told me I didn't quite coincide with either of her desires."
— Woody Allen (Side Effects)

"She wore a short skirt and a tight sweater and her figure described a set of parabolas that could cause cardiac arrest in a yak."
— Woody Allen (Getting Even)

"I wonder if Socrates and Plato took a house on Crete during the summer."
— Woody Allen (Love and Death)

"Liberty is always unfinished business."
— American Civil Liberties Union

"He was of the faith chiefly in the sense that the church he currently did not attend was Catholic."
— Kingsley Amis (One Fat Englishman)

"Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a nonexistent condition. The truth, Venus, is that nobody gets over anything."
— Martin Amis (House of Meetings)

"For both of us, I think, it had to do with our weakened power to love. It is strange that enslavement should have that effect – not just the fantastic degradation, not just the fear and the boredom and all the rest, but also the layered injustice, the silent injustice. So all right. We’re back where we started. To you, nothing – from you, everything. They took it from me, it seems, for no reason, other than that I value it so much."
— Martin Amis (House of Meetings)

"Gluttony and sloth, as worldly goals, were quietly usurped by avarice and lust, which, together with poetry (yes, poetry), consumed all my free time."
— Martin Amis (House of Meetings)

"I’m sitting in the prow-shaped dining room of a tourist steamer, the Georgi Zhukov, on the Yenisei River, which flows from the foothills of Mongolia to the Arctic Ocean, thus cleaving the northern Eurasian plain – a distance of some two and a half thousand versts. Given Russian distances, and the general arduousness of Russian life, you’d expect a verst to be the equivalent of – I don’t know – thirty-nine miles. In fact it’s barely more than a kilometer."
— Martin Amis (House of Meetings)

"In freedom, every non-nomenklatura citizen knew perpetual hunger – the involuntary slurp and gulp of the esophagus. In camp, your hunger kicked as I imagine a fetus would kick. It was the same with boredom. And boredom, by now, has lost all its associations with mere lassitude and vapidity. Boredom is no longer the absence of emotion; it is itself an emotion, and a violent one. A silent tantrum of boredom."
— Martin Amis (House of Meetings)

"In the Gulag, it was not the case that people died like flies. Rather, flies died like people."
— Martin Amis (House of Meetings)

"In the last months of the war, when I raped in uniform – we were, by then, so full of death (and the destruction of everything we had and knew) that the act of love, even in travesty, felt like a spell against the riot of murder."
— Martin Amis (House of Meetings)

"Once, as he inhaled with his customary vehemence, I had a thought that made my armpits come alive."
— Martin Amis (House of Meetings)

"Oppression lays down blood-lust. It lays it down like a wine."
— Martin Amis (House of Meetings)

"Rust is the failure of the work of man. The project, the venture, the experiment: failed, given up on, and not cleaned up after."
— Martin Amis (House of Meetings)

"The air itself was ebony, like the denial, the refutation, of the idea of light."
— Martin Amis (House of Meetings)

"There is a Western phenomenon called the male midlife crisis. Very often it is heralded by divorce. What history might have done to you, you bring about on purpose: separation from woman and child. Don’t tell me that such men aren’t tasting the ancient flavors of death and defeat.

In America, with divorce achieved, the midlifer can expect to be more recreational, more discretionary. He can almost design the sort of crisis he is going to have: motorbike, teenage girlfriend, vegetarianism, jogging, sports car, mature boyfriend, cocaine, crash diet, powerboat, new baby, religion, hair transplant.

Over here, now, there’s no angling around for your male midlife crisis. It is brought to you and it is always the same thing. It is death.
"
— Martin Amis (House of Meetings)

"They did more than take our youth away. They also took away the men we were going to be."
— Martin Amis (House of Meetings)

"Twenty-two poems covered the period from Lev’s first serious efforts to his arrest in 1948 at the age of nineteen. Very Mandelstamian, I adjudged: well-made, and studiously conversational, and coming close, here and there, to the images that really hurt and connect."
— Martin Amis (House of Meetings)

"Venus, I’m sorry that you’ve gone on minding that I didn’t let you drive me to O’Hare. “That’s what we do,” you said: “We drive each other to and from the airport.” Do you realize how rare that is? No one does it anymore, not even newlyweds. All right – it was selfish of me to decline. I said it was because I didn’t want to say goodbye to you in a public place. But I think it was the asymmetry of it that was really troubling me. You and I, we drive each other to and from the airport. And I didn’t want a to when I knew there wouldn’t be a from."
— Martin Amis (House of Meetings)

"When a man conclusively exalts one woman, and one woman only, “above all others,” you can be pretty sure you are dealing with a misogynist. It frees him up for thinking the rest are shit."
— Martin Amis (House of Meetings)

"When I opened the door to her I felt like a child who believes itself lost on a swarming street and suddenly sees that all-solving outline, that indispensable displacement of air."
— Martin Amis (House of Meetings)

"When you’ve lost all your play, guess what love becomes. Work. Work that gets harder every hour."
— Martin Amis (House of Meetings)

"[Describing the soap in the gulag] It smelt as if some sacred physical law had been demeaned in its creation."
— Martin Amis (House of Meetings)

"Sometimes racial prejudice is like a hair across your cheek. You can't see it, you can't find it with your fingers, but you keep brushing it because the feel of it is irritating."
— Marian Anderson

"No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes."
— Hannah Arendt

"Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"
— Isaac Asimov

"A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere."
— W.H. Auden