“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.”

“During my tenure at the Endowment, I often found that those who did us the most damage did so under the justification of helping us by 'preventing worse language.' In the military it would be called friendly fire. One ends up just as dead.”

“An apocryphal story recounts the dilhemma of a man during the Civil War who could not decide whether to join the Confederate or Union forces. Finally he put on a gray coat and blue pants, and both sides shot him.”

“How I hate ignorance! Caliban’s ignorance, my ignorance, the world’s ignorance! Oh, I could learn and learn and learn and learn. I could cry, I want to learn so much.”

“Here is the trap you are in.... And it's not my trap—I haven't trapped you. Because abortions are illegal, women who need and want them have no choice in the matter, and you—because you know how to perform them—have no choice, either. What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman's freedom of choice, too. If abortion was legal, a woman would have a choice—and so would you. You could feel free not to do it because someone else would. But the way it is, you're trapped. Women are trapped. Women are victims, and so are you.”

“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.”

“The White House usually followed the seagull theory of management: fly in, squawk and flap and shit, and fly away.”