“Because this law could mean so much or so little, it held potential for causing great mischief in the world of art and politics. We needed to reduce its uncertainty, and the best way to do that, I believed, was to force a court to interpret it, which would either void or narrow the law. To make it as broad a target as possible and to assure that someone would sue us, I reproduced the Helms amendment verbatim in the terms and conditions for grant recipients. It could not be ignored there, and if it was to be declared unconstitutional, it had to appear where the courts could not ignore it either.”

“No one would allow that he could not see these much-admired clothes; because, in doing so, he would have declared himself either a simpleton or unfit of his office.”

“Laws, it is said, are for the protection of the people. It's unfortunate that there are no statistics on the number of lives that are clobbered yearly as a result of laws: outmoded laws; laws that found their way onto the books as a result of ignorance, hysteria or political haymaking; antilife laws; biased laws; laws that pretend that reality is fixed and nature is definable; laws that deny people the right to refuse protection. A survey such as that could keep a dozen dull sociologists out of mischief for months.”

“Peoples do not judge in the same way as courts of law; they do not hand down sentences, they throw thunderbolts; they do not condemn kings, they drop them back into the void; and this justice is worth just as much as that of the courts.”

“Decent people should ignore politics, if only they could be confident that politics would ignore them”

“Community is a sign that love is possible in a materialistic world where people so often either ignore or fight each other. It is a sign that we don't need a lot of money to be happy--in fact, the opposite.”