Francois de La Rochefoucauld Quotes

My ambition is limited to the desire to capture something transient, and yet, this ambition is excessive.

If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so. If this world is a vicious trap, so is its accuser, and the pot is calling the kettle black.

When Pleasure is at the bar the jury is not impartial.

The dramatic critic who is without prejudice is on the plane with the general who does not believe in taking human life.

I shouldn't say bad things about the illiterate, though..I should write it. That way they won't find out.

In principle, I am against principles.

The egoist does not tolerate egoism.

The world laughs at things it would really prefer to admire, and like Aesop's fox it criticizes things it covets.

Everyone went out and bought Sex, it was sold out in two seconds. And then everybody slagged me off. That, to me is a statement of the hypocrisy of the world that we live in. The fact that everybody is so interested in sex but won't admit it.

To be honest, one must be inconsistent.

I never respond to Donald Trump's personal insults about me. I could care less what he says about me. I'm going to respond when he calls a judge unqualified because of his Mexican heritage, or mocks a reporter with a disability, or says demeaning things about women. And the list goes on.

Deluded liberal that I am, I persist in thinking that those with a streak of sexual unorthodoxy ought to be more tolerant of their fellows than those who lead an entirely godly, righteous and sober life. Illogically, I tend to assume that if you ( Philip Larkin) dream of caning schoolgirls bottoms, it disqualifies you from dismissing half the nation as work-shy.

We all do things at certain points that are contradictory. Some things, it's a smaller contradiction, and other things it's larger.

This country wants to live in the illusion that it is tolerant but also wants to be able to practice intolerance.

People will like you who never met you, they think you're absolutely wonderful; and then people also will hate you, for reasons that have nothing to do with any real experience with you. People don't want to lose their enemies. We have favorite enemies, people we love to hate and we hate to love. If they do something good, we don't like it. I found myself doing that with Ronald Reagan. He is anathema to me. If he does something that's reasonable, I find my mind trying to find some way to interpret it so that it's not reasonable, so that somewhere it's jingoist extremism.

Who trades in contradictions will not be contradicted.

We're all living contradictions, trying to survive in a world filled with hypocrites

What is slander? A verdict of "guilty" pronounced in the absence of the accused, with closed doors, without defence or appeal, by an interested and prejudiced judge.

We live in a world of intolerance masked as tolerance.

I am a misanthrope yet utterly benevolent.

I think everyone's so scared of other people judging them.

We live in an age of prejudice, dissimulation and paradox, wherein, like dry leaves caught in a whirlpool, some of us are tossed helpless . . . ever struggling between our honest convictions and fear of that cruelest of tyrants -- PUBLIC OPINION.

What must that be like? To be admired before you’ve even said a word, to be desired two or three hundred times a day by people who have absolutely no idea what you’re like?

I resist change even as I call for it.