Santorini, Greece - 2006
1. "A good deed never goes unpunished."
2. “A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.”
3. “As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by desatroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.”
4. “If most men and women were forced to rely upon physical charm to attract lovers, their sexual lives would be not only meager, but in a youth-worshiping country like America, painfully brief.”
5. "If the splitter of hairs has a sharp enough knife, the fact of life itself can be chopped into nothing."
6. "I have always found men quite fathomable. They look entirely to their own interest."
7. "I have found that there is no attitude so bizarre that one will not encounter it sooner or later if one travels far enough."
8. ”I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.”
9. "I suppose that one is always tempted to challenge those who think that they and they alone possess the truth or the way or the key to the mystery."
10. “It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.”
11. "It is vice to go to bed with someone you are not married to or have someone of your own sex or to get money for having sex with someone who does not appeal to you - incidentally, the basis of half the marriages of my generation."
12. “Laughing at someone else is an excellent way of learning how to laugh at oneself; and questioning what seem to be the absurd beliefs of another group is a good way of recognizing the potential absurdity of many of one's own cherished beliefs.”
13. "Least said, soonest mended."
14. "Nothing is true except from a single point of view."
15. "One's neighbor is always the enemy. That is the nature of things."
16. “One way to restore humility is to read the help-wanted ads. You'd be surprised how many positions there are which you are too ignorant, too unattractive, or too old to fill.”
17. "Our lives are dominated by symbols of our own making. Once we had invented time by differentiating one year from another, we became in thrall to the notion of the decade, the century, the millennium. Every twenty years the middle-aged celebrate the decade of their youth."
18. “Realism has always been called cynicism.”
19. ”Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say and not giving a damn.”
20. "Since no one can ever know for certain whether or not his own view of life is the correct one, it is absolutely impossible for him to know if someone else's is the wrong one."
21. "There is no such thing as a true account of anything."
22. “Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.”
23. ”Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.”
24. "To learn and not think over what you have learned is perfectly useless. To think without having learned is dangerous."
25. "True wisdom is to know the extent of what you don't know quite as well as you know what you do know."
26. “Whether you have an abortion, what you put in your own body, with whom you have sex - these are not the affairs of the state. A government does not exist to control the citizens. When it does, it is a tyranny, and must be fought. The tree of liberty, Jefferson warned us, must be refreshed with the blood of tyrants and patriots.”
