Top 15 John Leonard Quotes

It may be that the Greeks had it easy, with their light and their mountains and their plains and their islands waiting around for tourists. It was easy for them to believe that man fit in rather well. This fittingness may have given them the idea that we are seemlier than other evidence suggests. The heads of Rameses II at Abu Simbel and, for that matter, the skyscrapers of New York, have another idea of man. So do the artifacts of Albert Speer. It is depressing to wonder whether the Greeks just happened to be lucky, and the dream they left us is a lie about ourselves.

Monotheism was a terrible idea, leading directly to Lenin.

Somewhere in the Bill of Rights is a Pig Amendment; our freedom to stuff ourselves cannot be abridged. Having so stuffed, we demand a technological solution to the fat problem. Give me cyclamates, or give me death! This is not only immoral; it is also boring.

Isn't it amazing the way the future succeeds in creating an appropriate past?

To be capable of embarrassment is the beginning of moral consciousness. Honor grows from qualms.

You can't invent yourself as you maunder on. Your fabrications aren't going to impress the blood test, the urinalysis or the chest X-ray. Science is not amused.

In our brave new world, blushing is a form of nostalgia.

A bohemian imitates the manners of the class below him.

When the state murders, it assumes an authority I refuse to concede: the authority of perfect knowledge in final things.

Every fall I imagine once again that something wonderful will happen at a party. This is like imagining that the telephone book will prove to be a wonderful novel.

Suppose, deep down, you suspect that you are dull, and your public works are a form of vengeance. You talk a good poem, and think by numbers. Once upon a time, you were interesting; then Mother died and you had to give it up.

In God's body shop, each of us was customized. But science came along to substitute statistical inference for free will. We are now a tribe of likelihoods.

We are getting to be of an age when it is difficult to grow new friends; we haven't the energy, the time to cultivate; each one gone is a permanent impoverishment.

One advantage of remorse is that it sets the stage for consolation.

Granted, religion is wishful thinking, but there is no other kind of thinking.