The idea of a good society is something you do not need a religion and eternal punishment to buttress; you need a religion if you are terrified of death.
Gore Vidal Quotes
Apparently Bentham thought that human beings had but two desires, gain and pleasure, and he accepted those desires as the facts of our condition (he hated St. Paul) and tried to make of them a philosophy whose keystone was an eloquent defence of usury. He would have been at home in New York.
To the right wing ‘law and order’ is often just a code phrase, meaning ‘get the niggers’. To the left wing it often means political oppression.
The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western World. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity – much less dissent.
The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.
He’s a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices. (about Truman Capote)
The Astor Bar in Times Square was easily the city’s most exciting meeting place for soldiers, sailors, and marines on the prowl for one another; few civilians, and no woman, ever dared intrude on these male mysteries. Even the military police and the shore patrol kept their distance. After all, we had – all of […]
I was too polite to ask. (when asked if his first sexual encounter had been hetero- or homosexual)
I got to know Kinsey in 1948 – his book came out a month after The City and the Pillar; and the shocked New York Times would not advertise either. For a time, Dr. Kinsey used the mezzanine of the Astor as a sort of office, where he would interview “human males” about their sex […]
We are like people born in a cage and unable to visualize any world beyond our familiar bars of prejudice and superstition. That Opinion the Few create in order to control the Many has seen to it that we are kept in permanent ignorance of our actual estate. Even so, a number of prisoners are […]
