Quotes

Split at the root, neither Gentile nor Jew,

They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.

I have a predilection for painting that lends joyousness to a wall.

In a few generations you can breed a racehorse. The recipe for making a man like Delacroix is less well known.

War is a condition of progress; the whip-cut that prevents a country from going to sleep and forces satisfied mediocrity to shake off its apathy.

It’s with my brush that I make love.

[ To the surgeons about to operate on him after he was shot by John Hinckley :] Please tell me you’re Republicans.

Approximately 80% of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation, so let’s not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emission standards from man-made sources.

We should declare war on North Vietnam. . . . We could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it, and still be home for Christmas.

A tree’s a tree. How many more do you need to look at?

Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

I have recently been told that I am one of the millions of Americans who will be afflicted with Alzheimer’s Disease. . . . I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life. I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead.

A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that is true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.

I did say something in our negotiations in Iceland in Russian: Dovorey no provorey . That means trust, but verify.

I have my veto pen drawn and ready for any tax increase that Congress might even think of sending up. And I have only one thing to say to the tax increasers: Go ahead, make my day.

We’re especially not going to tolerate these attacks from outlaw states run by the strangest collection of misfits, looney tunes, and squalid criminals since the advent of the Third Reich.

[ Referring to his younger opponent, Walter Mondale :] I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.

In your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride—the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire.

Next Tuesday all of you will go to the polls, will stand there in the polling place and make a decision. I think when you make that decision it might be well if you would ask yourself: Are you better off than you were four years ago?

[ To his Democratic opponent Jimmy Carter :]

No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth!

I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

It had to be said. The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.

Who is John Galt?

Howard Roark laughed.

Kill reverence and you’ve killed the hero in man.

Ce n’est plus une ardeur dans mes veines cachée :

The day is not purer than the depths of my heart.

Je le vis, je rougis, je pâlis à sa vue .

In a month, in a year, how will we bear that so many seas separate me from you?

The appetite grows by eating.

Je l’ai trop aimé pour ne le point haïr!

Rire est le propre de l’homme .

You talk, you talk, that’s all you know how to do.

“My uncle always was respected;

Blessed is he who leaves the glory

In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived in himself.

Outside of this cell we may have our oppressors, yes, but not inside. Here no one oppresses the other. The only thing that seems to disturb me . . . because I’m exhausted, or conditioned, or perverted . . . is that someone wants to be nice to me, without asking anything back for it.

The truth is that every morning war is declared afresh. And the men who wish to continue it are as guilty as the men who began it, more guilty perhaps, for the latter perhaps did not foresee all its horrors.

The idea of Time was of value to me for yet another reason: it was a spur. . . . This life that we live in half-darkness can be illumined, this life that at every moment we distort can be restored to its true pristine shape, that a life, in short, can be realized within the confines of a book! How happy would be, I thought, the man who had the power to write such a book! What a task awaited him!

It is in sickness that we are compelled to recognize that we do not live alone but are chained to a being from a different realm, from whom we are worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body. . . . To ask pity of our body is like discoursing in front of an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning than the sound of the tides, and with which we should be appalled to find ourselves condemned to live.

An artist has no need to express his thought directly in his work for the latter to reflect its quality; it has even been said that the highest praise of God consists in the denial of Him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator.

And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which . . . my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane.

For a long time I used to go to bed early.

Les Demi-Vierges .

À la Recherche du Temps Perdu .

Je suis comme je suis

But the beauty is not the madness