Great Throughts Treasury

"American are weather junkies. They monitor it the way a hypochondriac listens to his own breathing and heartbeat in the middle of the night."

"Music is a form of spiritual carbon dating."

"The fundamental rule of the Age of Celebrity: “It doesn’t matter what you are, it only matters what people think you are.”"

"At its worst, American patriotism degenerates into a coarse form of national self-congratulation."

"Never forget the power of silence, that massively disconcerting pause which goes on and on and may at last induce an opponent to babble and backtrack nervously."

"Not to forgive is to be imprisoned by the past, by old grievances that do not permit life to proceed with new business. Not to forgive is to yield oneself to another's control... to be locked into a sequence of act and response, of outrage and revenge, tit for tat, escalating always. The present is endlessly overwhelmed and devoured by the past. Forgiveness frees the forgiver. It extracts the forgiver from someone else's nightmare"

"A rattlesnake loose in the living room tends to end all discussion of animal rights."

"One can live with the thought of one's own death. It is the thought of the death of the words and books that is terrifying for that is the deeper extinction."