The need for a non-veteran reserve became painfully obvious in the Korean war when many of the men who were being called to serve were World War II veterans participating in Ready Reserve units.

A particularly American ability to come up with consistently dreadful names for new things. Just as there is an inspiring national talent to invent stuff and to think forward, so there is an equal and opposite imaginative black hole when it comes to naming the stuff: the conflation and truncation of words, adding extraneous vowels and hyphens to the portmanteau

The French in particular confuse unadorned direct language with a lack of culture or intellectual elegance

Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples.

The richest people in the world aren’t particularly smart or happy. And the happiest people in the world aren’t particularly smart or rich… That leaves me making music. But we can’t talk about that.

If you’re a part of my family, I will love you violently.

The only meaningful life is a life that strives for the individual realization—absolute and unconditional—of its own particular law

Karl Marx said, “The task is not just to understand the world but to change it.” A variant to keep in mind is that if you want to change the world you’d better try to understand it. That doesn’t mean listening to a talk or reading a book, though that’s helpful sometimes. You learn from participating. You learn from others. You learn from the people you’re trying to organize. We all have to gain the understanding and the experience to formulate and implement ideas.

Everyone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s really an easy way: Stop participating in it.