Walter Kirn

“[T]he anti-vitriol vitriol is getting ugly.”

“Given Loughner's obsession with meaninglessness and language, maybe Foucault & Derrida deserve some fault here, too.”

“When Loughner himself speaks and we find out his real influences are Spiderman, 'Gnome Chomsky,' Taylor Swift, and Dr. Bronner, then what?”

“@bobbybaird i'm a writer, so are you. we try to compose our thoughts and words for effect as well as sense. vain of us? a bit.”

“Everyone loves a witch hunt as long as it's someone else's witch being hunted.”

“Memo to extreme partisans: If you can't bring yourselves to love your enemies, can you at least learn to hate your friends?”

“Reason leavened with a little wit (if possible) is the real alternative to hate speech, meaning that there's no better time for it.”

“The mist just keeps on lifting and soon I'll be able to see all the way, as far as the earth's curvature allows. It's a blessing, that curvature, that hidden hemisphere-if we could take it all in at one, why move?”

“Overpopulation has a ceiling: earth’s total surface area divided by the dimensions of one economy seat. One more baby is born and hello cannibalism.”

“It’s the little deceptions that no one catches that are going to dissolve it all someday. We’ll look at clocks and we won’t believe the hands. They’ll forecast sun but we’ll pack our slickers anyway.”

“The atom was split by persistence.”

“He knows, as all the cleverest ones do, that no human being is so interesting that he can't make himself more interesting still by acting retarded at random intervals. ”

“I've been told my old city possesses a 'thriving arts scene,' whatever that is; personally, I think artists should lie low and stick to their work, not line-dance through the parks.”