232 Quotes by Tom Wolfe

  • Author Tom Wolfe
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    They were alone in the elevator. Hoyt didn’t even wait for the doors to close before he started kissing Charlotte, pushing her up against the back wall, caressing her breasts, pressing his body against hers from chest to groin. She kissed him back in a spirited fashion and felt cool doing it, let her body go limp against the wall, wrapped her arms around his neck, allowed him to do whatever he wanted to her.

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  • Author Tom Wolfe
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    The sky turned a deep purple and all at once the stars and moon came out – and the sun shone at the same time. He had reached a layer of the upper atmosphere where the air was too thin to contain reflecting dust particles.

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  • Author Tom Wolfe
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    It is a rule, to which there has never been an exception, that when an actor or a television performer rises up to the microphone at one of these awards ceremonies and expresses moral indignation over something, he illustrates Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that ’moral indignation is a standard strategy for endowing the idiot with dignity.

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  • Author Tom Wolfe
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    The theory and the atheistic bias that came with it spread quickly to Germany, Italy, Spain, and to self-professed intellectual elites in the United States, even.

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  • Author Tom Wolfe
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    The attitude is we live and let live. This is actually an amazing change in values in a rather short time and it’s an example of freedom from religion.

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  • Author Tom Wolfe
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    Half a century ago, only Teilhard foresaw what is now known as the Internet. What Teilhard’s superiors in the Society of Jesus and the Church hierarchy thought about it all in the 1920s, however, was not much. The plain fact was that Teilhard accepted the Darwinian theory of evolution. He argued that biological evolution had been nothing more than God’s first step in an infinitely grander design. Nevertheless, he accepted it.

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  • Author Tom Wolfe
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    And – of course! – the Non-people. The whole freaking world was full of people who were bound to tell you they weren’t qualified to do this or that but they were determined to go ahead and do just that thing anyway.

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  • Author Tom Wolfe
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    Like more than one Englishman in New York, he looked upon Americans as hopeless children whom Providence had perversely provided with this great swollen fat fowl of a continent. Any way one chose to relieve them of their riches, short of violence, was sporting, if not morally justifiable, since they would only squander it in some tasteless and useless fashion, in any event.

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  • Author Tom Wolfe
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    That flag is a symbol we attach our emotions to, but it isn’t the emotion itself and it isn’t the thing we really care about. Sometimes we don’t even realize what we really care about, because we get so distracted by the symbols.

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