The largest cultural menace in America is the conformity of the intellectual cliques which, in education as well as the arts, are out to impose upon the nation their modish fads and fallacies, and have nearly succeeded in doing so.
When in 1951 I was inducted into the CIA as a deep cover agent, the procedures for disguising my affiliation and my work were unsmilingly comprehensive.
I will not cede more power to the state.
Our political economy and our high-energy industry run on large, general principles, on ideas — not by day-to-day guess work, expedients and improvisations. Ideas have to go into exchange to become or remain operative; and the medium of such exchange is the printed word.
We can see that at free-market rates, $20 per week would provide the addict with the cocaine which, in this wartime drug situation, requires of him $1,000.
We do not know what dealings she might have been engaging in which are now interrupted or even made impossible. … In my case, it was 15 years after reentry into the secular world before my secret career in Mexico was blown, harming no one except perhaps some who might have been put off by my deception.
More people die every year as a result of the war against drugs than die from what we call, generically, overdosing.
Conservatives pride themselves on resisting change, which is as it should be. But intelligent deference to tradition and stability can evolve into intellectual sloth and moral fanaticism, as when conservatives simply decline to look up from dogma because the effort to raise their heads and reconsider is too great.
One can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed.
I won't insult your intelligence by suggesting that you really believe what you just said.
Though liberals do a great deal of talking about hearing other points of view, it sometimes shocks them to learn that there are other points of view.
I would rather be governed by the first 2000 people in the Manhattan phone book than the entire faculty of Harvard.
Decent people should ignore politics, if only they could be confident that politics would ignore them
Life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years.
Liberals, it has been said, are generous with other peoples' money, except when it comes to questions of national survival when they prefer to be generous with other peoples' freedom and security.
I would like to take you seriously but to do so would affront your intelligence.
If you had a European prime minister who experienced what we've experienced it would be expected that he would retire or resign.
The cost of the drug war is many times more painful, in all its manifestations, than would be the licensing of drugs combined with intensive education of non-users and intensive education designed to warn those who experiment with drugs.
I've always subconsciously looked out for the total Christian and when I found him he turned out to be a non-practicing Jew.
It is safe to say that if the Communists took over the Sahara Desert tomorrow, two things would happen. First, nothing. And second, with their centralized approach to the market, there would be a shortage of sand.
