“The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.”
Education
“A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.”
LeadershipAll Quotes by John Updike
“What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.”
Art“The first breath of adultery is the freest after it, constraints aping marriage develop.”
Marriage“A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.”
Patience“Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.”
Religion“Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.”
Wisdom“Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.”
Respect“We are most alive when we're in love.”
Love“Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.”
Sports“Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.”
Home“Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.”
Government“I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.”
Alone“Customs and convictions change respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.”
Art“That a marriage ends is less than ideal but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.”
Marriage“Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.”
Alone“A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.”
Leadership“Dreams come true without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.”
Dreams“Existence itself does not feel horrible it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.”
Experience“Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.”
Marriage“The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.”
Society