William Gaddis

Power doesn’t corrupt people; people corrupt power.

Let them look up in the sky then…! if they must be so blind, that cannot see the truth in broad daylight, but must have the whole world in darkness to see the conceit of the stars…

I mean why should somebody go steal and break the law to get all they can when there’s always some law where you can be legal and get it all anyway!

Esther liked books out where everyone could see them, a sort of graphic index to the intricate labyrinth of her mind arrayed to impress the most casual guest, a system of immediate introduction which she had found to obtain in a number of grimy intellectual households in Greenwich Village.

The function of this school is custodial. It’s here to keep these kids off the streets until the girls are big enough to get pregnant and the boys are old enough to go out and hold up a gas station.

I see the player piano as the grandfather of the computer, the ancestor of the entire nightmare we live in, the birth of the binary world where there is no option other than yes or no and where there is no refuge.

There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.

Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.

A good End cannot sanctifie evil Means; nor must we ever do Evil, that Good may come of it. Some Folks think they may Scold, Rail, Hate, Rob and Kill too; so it be but for God’s sake. But nothing in us unlike him, can please him.

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly.

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.

Less judgment than wit is more sail than ballast.

Studies serve for delight, for ornaments, and for ability.

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

The way in which men cling to old institutions after the life has departed out of them, and out of themselves, reminds me of those monkeys which cling by their tails – aye, whose tails contract about the limbs, even the dead limbs, of the forest, and they hang suspended beyond the hunter’s reach long after they are dead. It is of no use to argue with such men. They have not an apprehensive intellect, but merely, as it were a prehensile tail.

On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfill the promise of our friend’s life also, in our own, to the world.

Nations! What are nations? Tartars! and Huns! and Chinamen! Like insects they swarm. The historian strives in vain to make them memorable. It is for want of a man that there are so many men. It is individuals that populate the world.

We cannot well do without our sins; they are the highway of our virtue.

The pleasure we feel in music springs from the obedience which is in it.

Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them.