Captain Smek himself appeared on television for an official speech to humankind. [...] 'Noble Savages of Earth,' he said. 'Long time we have tried to live together in peace.' (It had been five months.) 'Long time have the Boov suffered under the host...
Finally, I formulate and say a little prayer to God, and since we haven’t officially spoken since my mom and Elliott died that takes up quite a bit of my time. The rest of it I spend on trying to determine what I think love really is and what I act...
J. Edgar Hoover: I have to wonder if you people realize the level of responsibility you carry. From my way of thinking, Motion Pictures are potentially the most influential form of communication ever invented. And there's no control over it. Your mes...
Henry Gatewood: [clutching valise with embezzled funds] I can't get over the impertinence of that young lieutenant. I'll make it warm for that shake-tail! I'll report him to Washington - we pay taxes to the government and what do we get? Not even pro...
Ask them about their sex lives or their drinking habits or the times they beat up on Granny and they may dodge around a little but eventually they'll tell you all about it - they're dying to tell. Get to the money question, though, and they start act...
The prevailing taste of the public for anecdote has been censured and ridiculed by critics, who aspire to the character of superior wisdom: but if we consider it in a proper point of view, this taste is an incontestible proof of the good sense and pr...
Though I have been busy, perhaps overbusy, all my life, it seems to me now that I have accomplished little that matters, that the books have never come up to what was in my head, and that the rewards—the comfortable income, the public notice, the l...
With a little more patience and a little less temper, a gentler and wiser method might be found in almost every case; and the knot that we cut by some fine heady quarrel-scene in private life, or, in public affairs, by some denunciatory act against w...
What am I going to do?" asked Ce'Nedra. "First you ought to go wash your face," Polgara told her. "Some girls can cry without making themselves ugly, but you don't have the right coloring for it. You're an absolute fright. I'd advise you never to cry...
If this had been a public-school locker room, there would have been some gray jumbo-sized garbage cans nearby, and I probably could've taken care of cleanup by myself. But apparently the girls of St. Andrew's don't throw anything away, because all th...
Initially, the purveyors of racism need no more than the silent acquiescence of the public ... [I]t is never too soon to confront bigotry and racism whenever, wherever, and in whatever form it raises its ugly head. It is incumbent upon all people to ...
It's amazing--my parents call everything a discussion. If I were standing across the street, firing a bazooka at my mother, while my father was launching mortar back at me, and Jeffery was charging down the driveway with a grenade in his teeth, my pa...
Action is the activity of the rational soul, which abhors irrationality and must combat it or be corrupted by it. When it sees the irrationality of others, it must seek to correct it, and can do this either by teaching or engaging in public affairs i...
If your lot makes you cry and be wretched, get rid of it and take another; strike out for yourself; don't listen to the shriek of your relations...don't be afraid of public opinion in the shape of the neighbours in the next house, when all the world ...
In particular, the State has arrogated to itself a compulsory monopoly over police and military services, the provision of law, judicial decision-making, the mint and the power to create money, unused land ("the public domain"), streets and highways,...
What is certain is that he [the baby] has too much attention from the one person who is entirely at his disposal. The intimacy between mother and child is not sustaining and healthy. The child learns to exploit his mother's accessibility, badgering h...
Whether in private debate or in public, any attempt I made to explain how the Black Muslim movement came about, and how it has achieved such force, was met with a blankness that revealed the little connection that the liberals' attitudes have with th...
Nonetheless the man (Hitler) had a remarkable ability to transform himself into something far more compelling, especially when speaking in public or during private meetings when some topic enraged him. He had a knack as well for projecting an aura of...
The one plentiful herds of magazine writers would continue to be culled - by the Internet, by the recession, by the American public, who would rather watch TV or play video games or electronically inform friends that, like, 'rain sucks!' But there's ...
We have all sorts of conditions of booksellers: one is fanatic on the subject of libraries. He thinks that every public library should be dynamited. Another thinks that moving pictures will destroy the book trade. What rot! Surely everything that aro...
He was the old breed of Filipino, almost extinct, who required that he deserve what he received; who would feel guilt, not only shame or embarrassment; who accounted for each day in the office and observed public trust as if it were a word of God. Bu...
