Skip to content

He sounded like Jean-François Revel, a French socialist writer who talks about one of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.

— Tom Wolfe Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine (1976)

Another quote →

More quotes by Tom Wolfe

A cult is a religion with no political power.

It would be all one experience, with all the senses opened wide, words, music, lights, sounds, touch —
lightning.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968)

Everything was becoming allegorical, understood by the group mind, and especially this: "You're either on the bus … or off the bus."

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968)

A sect, incidentally, is a religion with no political power.

Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine (1976)

Among other things Jonestown was an example of a definition well known to sociologists of religion: a cult is a religion with no political power.

In Our Time (1980)

All Tom Wolfe quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Tom Wolfe (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.