Novelists are not equipped to make a movie in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting they're dressing the scene they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

Journalists say a thing that they know isn't true in the hope that if they keep on saying it long enough it will be true.

I think journalists have the right to their opinions but I think their opinions should be based on history and what they see not what they feel how long they've been waiting or whether it's raining or it's snowing or whatever.

The history of the last century shows as we shall see later that the advice given to governments by bankers like the advice they gave to industrialists was consistently good for bankers but was often disastrous for governments businessmen and the people generally.

Journalists should denounce government by public opinion polls.

The guy keeps making speeches about redistribution and maybe we ought to do something to businesses that don't invest their holding too much money. We haven't heard that kind of talk except from pure socialists. Everybody's afraid of the government and there's no need soft peddling it it's the truth. It is the truth.

Obama is trying to paint us as a caricature as if we're some bizarre individualists who are hardcore libertarians. It's a false dichotomy and intellectually lazy. Of course we believe in government. We think government should do what it does really well but that it has limits.

The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.

Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.

When we criticize in Iran the actions of the government the fundamentalists say that we and the Bush Administration are in the same camp. The funny thing is that human rights activists and Mr. Bush can never be situated in the same group.