“This evening heard Carmen on the radio, and reflected how hard it was to vamp a man while singing at the top of one's voice. That is the operatic problem; the singer must keep up a head of stream while trying to appear secretive, or seductive, or consumptive. Some ingenious composer should write an opera about a group of people who were condemned by a cruel god to scream all the time; it would be an instantaneous success, and a triumph of verisimilitude.”

Tsurezure-Gusa (Essays in Idleness)

Source: Pensées

Interviewed in The New Yorker, May 7, 1955.

Source: Sonny's Blues

Poem written on Death Row; from Arkansas Literary Forum, Volume 9 2007 http://www.wm3.org/live/thewm3/damien_details.php?id=30, as noted on the Free The West Memphis 3 web site. (url accessed on October 16, 2008).

“Though Control in the USA: The Case of the Middle East,” Index on Censorship, July/August 1986, quoted in John H. George, Be Reasonable: Selected Quotations for Inquiring Minds, Prometheus Books, 1994 p. 64
Quotes 1960s-1980s, 1980s
Context: From a comparative perspective, the United States is unusual if not unique in the lack of restraints on freedom of expression. It is also unusual in the range and effectiveness of methods employed to restrain freedom of thought... Where the voice of the people is heard, elite groups must insure their voice says the right things… The less the state is able to employ violence in the defense of the interest of the elite groups that effectively dominate it, the more it becomes necessary to devise techniques of ‘manufacture of consent’… Where obedience is guaranteed by violence, rulers may tend towards a ‘behaviourist’ conception; it is enough that people obey; what they think does not matter too much. Where the state lacks means of coercion, it is important to control what people think.

13 June 1875.
The Walk With God (1919)
Context: I feel that I must attack this creed of blood, which does much to keep up the cruel and sanguinary views of barbarous ages about God and man. Will take text, "Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of heaven." Show that Christ brought a new interest into the world; a new vision of God, the loving one; a new view of man, the hopeful and universal one; his death in its character the seal to his perfect life. But we are saved by his doctrine, by the same spirit which animated his life, — we are saved by his life, not by his death, except as it was the necessary moral sequence of his life.

1970s, BOBBY FISCHER SPEAKS OUT! (1977)