“Those who have succeeded in procuring this admirable materialism have the joy of feeling themselves irresponsible, and of thinking that they can devour everything without uneasiness,--places, sinecures, dignities, power, whether well or ill acquired, lucrative recantations, useful treacheries, savory capitulations of conscience,--and that they shall enter the tomb with their digestion accomplished.”

“Those who have succeeded at anything and don't mention luck are kidding themselves.”

“What [Sarah] Palin so beguilingly represented ... was a form of female power that was utterly digestible to those who had no intellectual or political use for actual women: feminism without the feminists.”

“Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape. ”

“As jealous types of this kind are tragically lacking their own identities, they live vicariously, feeding off others. They appropriate an object like cannibals devour their enemies, in order to gain power for themselves. They believe that through the act of theft (or devouring) they are incorporating the qualities of those they secretly admire. ”

“In the future, the great division will be between those who have trained themselves to handle these complexities and those who are overwhelmed by them -- those who can acquire skills and discipline their minds and those who are irrevocably distracted by all the media around them and can never focus enough to learn.”