It was difficult being a teacher and out of the closet in the ’50s. By the time I retired, the English department was proud of having a gay poet of a certain minor fame. It was a very satisfactory change!

The next time some academics tell you how important ‘diversity’ is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.

You know how sometimes department stores have these things where, if you win, you get 10 minutes to go in and take anything you want from the store? That’s basically what I’m doing. I’m running in and just trying to grab as many characters as possible before they pull the plug on me.

The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department

Tellingly, the department that deals with relations with the rest of the world doesn’t have the word “foreign” in it: it is the State Department. It looks after the interests of one state alone. It might be called the Bargepole Department

A vote is like a rifle: its usefulness depends upon the character of the user.

There was a power outage at a department store yesterday. Twenty people were trapped on the escalators.

I’m a science guy. I’m a geek. I love geology and botany and marine science. I thought maybe I’d be a professional guide, or maybe even a park ranger, working for the Department of Fish and Game.

It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves

If with a pure mind a person speaks or acts happiness follows him like his never-departing shadow.

Unless you can get the ear of a Senator, or a Congressman, or a Chief of a Bureau or Department, and persuade him to use his ‘influence’ in your behalf, you cannot get an employment of the most trivial nature in Washington.

And one of the first and most startling things you find out is, that every individual you encounter in the City of Washington … from the highest bureau chief, clear down to the maid who scrubs Department halls, the night watchmen of the public buildings… represents Political Influence.

For one man cannot do right in one department of life whilst he is occupied in doing wrong in any other department. Life is one indivisible whole.

I had at one time a very bad fever of which I almost died. In my fever I had a long consistent delirium. I dreamt that I was in Hell, and that Hell is a place full of all those happenings that are improbable but not impossible. The effects of this are curious. Some of the damned, when they first arrive below, imagine that they will beguile the tedium of eternity by games of cards. But they find this impossible, because, whenever a pack is shuffled, it comes out in perfect order, beginning with the Ace of Spades and ending with the King of Hearts. There is a special department of Hell for students of probability. In this department there are many typewriters and many monkeys. Every time that a monkey walks on a typewriter, it types by chance one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. There is another place of torment for physicists. In this there are kettles and fires, but when the kettles are put on the fires, the water in them freezes. There are also stuffy rooms. But experience has taught the physicists never to open a window because, when they do, all the air rushes out and leaves the room a vacuum.

As I said last week in the wake of the grand jury decision, I think Ferguson laid bare a problem that is not unique to St. Louis or that area, and is not unique to our time, and that is a simmering distrust that exists between too many police departments and too many communities of color.