John Leonard Short Quotes

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A bohemian imitates the manners of the class below him.

John Leonard
In our brave new world, blushing is a form of nostalgia.

John Leonard
Monotheism was a terrible idea, leading directly to Lenin.

John Leonard
One advantage of remorse is that it sets the stage for consolation.

John Leonard
Isn't it amazing the way the future succeeds in creating an appropriate past?

John Leonard
Granted, religion is wishful thinking, but there is no other kind of thinking.

John Leonard
Everybody is forever saying that the essay is dead. This is always said in essays.

John Leonard
To be capable of embarrassment is the beginning of moral consciousness. Honor grows from qualms.

John Leonard
When the state murders, it assumes an authority I refuse to concede: the authority of perfect knowledge in final things.

John Leonard
Every intelligent child is an amateur anthropologist. The first thing such a child notices is that adults don't make sense.

John Leonard
In God's body shop, each of us was customized. But science came along to substitute statistical inference for free will. We are now a tribe of likelihoods.

John Leonard
You can't invent yourself as you maunder on. Your fabrications aren't going to impress the blood test, the urinalysis or the chest X-ray. Science is not amused.

John Leonard
Every fall I imagine once again that something wonderful will happen at a party. This is like imagining that the telephone book will prove to be a wonderful novel.

John Leonard
We are getting to be of an age when it is difficult to grow new friends; we haven't the energy, the time to cultivate; each one gone is a permanent impoverishment.

John Leonard
In the cellars of the night, when the mind starts moving around old trunks of bad times, the pain of this and the shame of that, the memory of a small boldness is a hand to hold.

John Leonard
Run from the Furies, and they find you, as if fear were a homing device, as if literature itself, on contemplating the abyss, were an invitation to jump into it, while Wagner whistles.

John Leonard