Films are even stranger, for what we are seeing are not disguised people but photographs of disguised people, and yet we believe them while the film is being shown.
Reagan is doing to the country what he can no longer do to his wife.
In the ordinary moral universe, the good will do the best they can, the worst will do the worst they can, but if you want to make good people do wicked things, you’ll need religion.
I have no time to waste on this planet being told what to do by those who think that God has given them instructions.
Many writers, especially male ones, have told us that it is the decease of the father which opens the prospect of one's own end, and affords an unobstructed view of the undug but awaiting grave that says 'you're next. ' Unfilial as this may seem, that was not at all so in my own case. It was only when I watched Alexander [my own son] being born that I knew at once that my own funeral director had very suddenly, but quite unmistakably, stepped onto the stage. I was surprised by how calmly I took this, but also by how reluctant I was to mention it to my male contemporaries.
One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human pre-history where nobody - not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms - had the smallest idea what was going on.
We have no proof that Socrates ever existed. We only know from witnesses to his life that he did. Like Jesus, he never wrote anything down. It doesn't matter to me whether he did or not exist because we have his teachings, his method of thinking, and his extreme intellectual and moral courage.
Learn From Yesterday, Live for Today, hope for tomorrow.
Language, if it throws a veil over our ideas, adds a softness and refinement to them, like that which the atmosphere gives to naked objects.
Religion, oh, just another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art.
I don't think people want to look at problems. They want a continuous narrative, an optimistic narrative. A narrative that says there's a present and a future - and what was in the past no longer exists.