A society person who is enthusiastic about modern painting or Truman Capote is already half a traitor to his class. It is middle-class people who, quite mistakenly, imagine that a lively pursuit of the latest in reading and painting will advance their status in the world.
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Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.
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Congress-these, for the most part, illiterate hacks whose fancy vests are spotted with gravy and whose speeches, hypocritical, unctuous and slovenly, are spotted also with the gravy of political patronage.
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Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted.
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Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.
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I am putting real plums into an imaginary cake.
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I'm afraid I'm not sufficiently inhibited about the things that other women are inhibited about for me. They feel that you've given away trade secrets.
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If someone tells you he is going to make "a realistic decision", you immediately understand that he is going to do something bad.
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Is it really so difficult to tell a good action from a bad one? I think one usually knows right away or a moment afterward, in a horrid flash of regret.
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Liberty, as it is conceived by current opinion, has nothing inherent about it; it is a sort of gift or trust bestowed on the individual by the state pending good behavior.
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People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children.
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The American character looks always as if it had just had a rather bad haircut, which gives it, in our eyes at any rate, a greater humanity than the European, which even among its beggars has an all too professional air.
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The Crucifixion and other historical precedents notwithstanding, many of us still believe that outstanding goodness is a kind of armor, that virtue, seen plain and bare, gives pause to criminality. But perhaps it is the other way around.
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The labor of keeping house is labor in its most naked state, for labor is toil that never finishes, toil that has to be begun again the moment it is completed, toil that is destroyed and consumed by the life process.
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To be disesteemed by people you don't have much respect for is not the worst fate.
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We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words, you are the hero of your own story.
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We are the hero of our own story.
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You musn't force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex.
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