Herbert Kaufman Quotes

My greatest enemy is reality. I have fought it successfully for thirty years.

I'm not going to stop painting just to take orders.

I was trying to find out what it was that everybody else understood without giving up my stubborn and hard-won lack of understanding.

The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. Instead of changing their views to fit the facts, they try to change the facts to fit their views.

You know, I was a school rebel. Whatever they said do, I didn't do. I was totally anti-everything.

I suppose it's a very highly developed form of denial, but some part of me completely denies that I'm a performer.

As I read 'The Infinities', with its magical, playful richness, its sensuous delight in the power of language to convey the strangeness and beauty of being human, I wondered if J. M. Coetzee, with his bleak, pared-down, elemental view of the world, had ever read a Banville and, if he had, whether he had envied him his astonishing powers.

My outlook was, 'You're not my moms; you can't tell me what to do.' I got expelled from about 20 schools.

I do not take orders from Washington, and I suggest that no one else should either.

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state on innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.

Whatever is spoken of acquires a certain existence.

The days are stacked against what we think we are.

For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured-disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui-in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable.

Words enable us to transfer our thoughts from inside our own mind into the mind of another. They have the power to alter history, to describe the past, and to bring meaning and substance to the present.

ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee

If we had to kneel in order to live in peace, [ U.S. government] will have to kill us before.

That's how a thing starts out real then ends up just an idea.

And we, spectators always, everywhere, looking at, never out of, everything! It fills us. We arrange it. It collapses. We re-arrange it, and collapse ourselves. Who's turned us round like this, so that we always, do what we may, retain the attitude of someone who's departing? Just as he, on the last hill, that shows him all his valley for the last time, will turn and stop and linger, we live our lives, for ever taking leave.

A million years of evolution, Eric said bitterly, and what are we? Animals.

I write about the things that happen to us all. The things that are tough, the things that matter, from a loved one fighting an illness, to losing a job, being betrayed by somebody you trust, all parts of the human condition. No one is exempt from those things.

Why is it that, despite having achieved previously undreamed-of miracles of progress, we seem more helpless in facing life than our less privileged ancestors were? The answer seems clear: while humankind collectively has increased its material powers a thousandfold, it has not advanced very far in terms of improving the content of experience.

The best break anybody ever gets is in bein' alive in the first place. An' you don't unnerstan' what a perfect deal it is until you realizes that you ain't gone be stuck with it forever, either.

Diagnoses exist to help get people services they need - but there's no such thing as mental illness. We're all mentally ill.

Human life has no meaning independent of itself. There is no cosmic force or deity to give it meaning or significance. There is no ultimate destiny for man. Such a belief is an illusion of humankind's infancy. The meaning of life is what we choose to give it. Meaning grows out of human purposes alone. Nature provides us with an infinite range of opportunities, but it is only our vision and our action that select and realize those that we desire.

A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind.