“It turned out I had always been a smoker. I just hadn't had any cigarettes.”

“Smokers, male and female, inject and excuse idleness in their lives every time they light a cigarette.”

“Visitor: Monsieur Degas, were there any of Monet's pictures at the Durand-Ruel exhibition?
Degas: Why, I met Monet himself there, and I said to him, 'Let me get out of here. Those reflections in the water hurt my eyes!' His pictures were always too draughty for me. If it had been any worse I should have had to turn up my coat collar.”

“Once I thought I found love, but then I realized I was just out
of cigarettes.”

“I have enormous admiration for the Jewish people, inside or outside Israel. There have always been Jewish members of my staff and indeed my Cabinet. In fact I just wanted a Cabinet of clever, energetic people – and frequently that turned out to be the same thing. My old constituency of Finchley has a large Jewish population. In the thirty-three years I represented it I never had a Jew come in poverty and desperation to one of my constituency surgeries. They had always been looked after by their own community.”

“He had been cheated out of his compensation, on a technicality, by the corrupt officialdom of the spaceways. He’d turned criminal then, and had been as ruthless to society as it had been to him.”

“There were not many people who could say that their education had been paid for with cigarettes.”

“That’s the thing about a human life-there’s no control group, no way to ever know how any of us would have turned out if any variables had been changed.”

“That's the thing about human life--there is no control group, no way to ever know how any of us would have turned out if any variables had been changed.”

“I had people coming up and telling me they hadn't voted in twenty-five years, but they were turning out for me on Tuesday. I still see the face of this kid who approached me in the little town of Willmar. "Jesse," he said, "you are us."”