124 quotes
In America all too few blows are struck into flesh. We kill the spirit here, we are experts at that. We use psychic bullets and kill each other cell by cell.
The Presidential Papers (1963)
One gets the impression that people come to Los Angeles in order to divorce themselves from the past, here to live or try to live in the rootless pleasure world of an adult child.
Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)
I was now at a university in New York, a professor of existential psychology with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation.
An American Dream (1965)
Comfortless was my religion, anxiety of the anxieties, for I believed God was not love, but courage. Love came only as a reward.
An American Dream (1965)
The need of the city is to accelerate growth; the pride of the small town is to retard it.
Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)
However could he organize his novel? What form to give it? It is so complex. Too loose, thinks Sam, too scattered.
The Man Who Studied Yoga (1956)
A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.
The Presidential Papers (1963)
Madness is locked beneath. It goes into tissues, is swallowed by the cells. The cells go mad. Cancer is their flag. Cancer is the growth of madness denied.
An American Dream (1965)
Why else lead a life of bad banquet dinners, cigar smoke, camp chairs, foul breath, and excruciatingly dull jargon if not to avoid the echoes of what is not known.
Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)
What were the phenomena of the world today? If I knew little else, I knew the answer — war, and the preparations for new war.
Barbary Shore (1951)
The world's not what I want it to be. But then no one ever said I had the right to design the world.
TIME interview (1991)
I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.
He felt a crude ecstasy. He could not have given the reason, but the mountain tormented him, beckoned him, held an answer to something he wanted. It was so pure, so austere.
The Naked and the Dead (1948)
Culture is worth a little risk.
Politics quarantines one from history; most of the people who nourish themselves in the political life are in the game not to make history but to be diverted from the history which is being made.
Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)
America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.
Advertisements for Myself (1959)
Everyone from the meanest starving cripple to an ambitious young man could expand to the optimism of an improving future because the man offered an unspoken promise of a future which would be rich.
Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)
A nation fights well in proportion to the amount of men and materials it has. And the other equation is that the individual soldier in that army is a more effective soldier the poorer his standard of living has been in the past.
The Naked and the Dead (1948)
When the wind carries a cry which is meaningful to human ears, it is simpler to believe the wind shares with us some part of the emotion of Being than that the mysteries of a hurricane's rising murmur reduce to no more than the random collision of insensate molecules.
Advertisements for Myself (1959)
The excessive hysteria of the Red wave was no preparation to face an enemy, but rather a terror of the national self.
Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)