Woody Allen

To you I'm an atheist. To God, I'm the Loyal Opposition.

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality through not dieing.

When I was in school I cheated on my metaphysics exam. I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.

Robert Nozick, "Anarchy, State & Utopia"

Taxation is a form of forced labour. There are only individual people, different individual people, with their own individual lives. Using one of these people for the benefit of others uses him and benefits the others. Nothing more. Talk of an overall social good covers this up.

Mohammad Ali on Vietnam, 1967

Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No., I am not going ten thousand miles away from home to help murder and burn another poor national simply to continue the domination of white slavemasters of the darker people the world over/ This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would put my prestige in jeopardy and could cause me to lose millions of dollars which should accrue to me as champion. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of the people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting their own justice, freedom and equality.

If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn't have to draft me: I'd join tomorrow. But I either have to obey the laws of the land or the laws of Allah. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I'll go to jail. We've been in jail for four hundred years.

Irving Howe on JFK, shortly after the assassination

Would it be sacrilegious to whisper that JFK for all his charm, his style, his intelligence, was not quite the "great president" almost everyone seems obliged to say he was? To enter this dissent in no way affects the grief every decent person feels at the President's death. After all, even not-so-great Presidents, like not-so-great human being in general, have a right to live out the natural course of their lives.

Mr Kennedy performed one deed for which he deserves high credit, and that is the signing of the atom test ban treaty, even though the treaty has more symbolic importance than final bearing, it is valuable insofar as it reflects the desire of almost everyone for an easing of the Cold War. But as for the rest of Mr Kennedy's record, especially in domestic affairs, he was not a firm or innovating liberal, and what is more, he did not particularly claim to be.

He confined himself far too much to legislative and bureaucratic manoeuvring, he did not try to understand the necessity or value of trying to arouse the masses of people to a strongly felt political involvement and participation. His proposals were at best intelligent, but almost entirely insufficient.

And on the critical issue of civil rights, he lagged at first, responded only after a great mass movement of Negroes exerted heavy pressure, and then failed to understadn that there are some issues on which it is better (both morally and politically) to go down fighting than to back away shrewdly.