You want to hurl the book across the room at times, but with an awareness that you would then need to go over and pick it up to continue reading

If we aren’t careful, we will encourage companies that have enough money for collection to leave the drilling to those that don’t

Apparently it’s crazy to want our species extinct, but crazy not to want it arbitrarily smaller

Most of the great novels were written by authors under 40

In times like these, deficit spending to pump up the economy doesn’t make consumers feel more confident; it makes them feel more insecure because they see a political system out of control

A sad fact of human existence is that an average life seldom contains more than 20 World Cups

We live half our lives in shock, he thought. And it’s the second half

Twenty-two men chase a ball for ninety minutes, and at the end the Germans win

Today’s supermarket customers eat considerably better than the Queen ate 50 years ago

In a football match, everything is complicated by the presence of the other team

It is by no means certain that people would be happier if they knew their condition in life to correspond to their true capacities

Mr. Markson did not much bother with character development or plot; nor, as his work evolved, did he care much for devices of organization like chapters, or even paragraphs

Obviously you hold the view you think is most likely to be true. But I think you should give that something like 60-40, whereas in reality most people will give it 95 to 5, or 99 to 1, in terms of probability that it is correct

Confronted with the real world, the reflex reaction of philosophers is to ask about possible worlds

Most people are neither bad apples nor good eggs, but soft fruit that can easily turn from ripe to rotten

What distinguishes performance art from the rest of art is the presence of the artist’s body

Historians like bureaucracy, because it feeds their hunger for written sources

only 28% of Americans can name two or more First Amendment rights; on the plus side, the same study found that 52% can name two or more characters on the Simpsons

The perfect group size is 8-12 people. If a group that size can’t get it done, then it’s time to break down the task

Apparently it is a great idea to elect a president who is calm in a crisis, except when there's a crisis. Then what you need is somebody to lead the nation in panic