232 Quotes by Tom Wolfe

The Science of Language will yet enable us to withstand the extreme theories of evolutionists and to draw a hard and fast line between man and brute.

I’ve never met an American who wanted to build an empire.

No wonder marriages used to hold up better. Sherman’s parents and their friends had all had plenty of servants, and the servants had worked long hours and lived in. If you were unwilling to argue in front of the servants, then there wasn’t much opportunity to argue at all.

Wilson compressed his theory into one sentence during an interview. Every human brain, he said, is born not as a blank slate waiting to be filled in by experience but as “an exposed negative waiting to be slipped into developer fluid.” The negative might be developed well or it might be developed poorly, but all you were going to get was what was already on the negative at birth.

Many wives of fighter pilots would end up looking on helplessly as their husbands grew more and more distant, a fact they would acknowledge in what were meant as lighthearted remarks, such as: “I’m only his mistress – he’s married to an airplane.” Often she would be overstating their intimacy; the actual mistress would be someone she didn’t know about.

A persistent case of the bingos was enough to wash a man out of night carrier landings. That did not mean you were finished as a Navy pilot. It merely meant that you were finished so far as carrier ops were concerned, which meant that you were finished so far as combat was concerned, which meant you were no longer in the competition, no longer ascending the pyramid, no longer qualified for the company of those with the right stuff.

What makes you think you can come before the bench waving the banner of community pressure? The law is not a creature of the few or of the many.

Then he put that one down behind a framed sepia-tone picture of a baseball player named Cecil Travis and picked up another one and tilted it back to his lips.

The seven men pressed on. They were tired of the designation of “capsule” for the Mercury vehicle. The term as much as declared that the man inside was not a pilot but an experimental animal in a pod. Gradually, everybody began trying to work the term “spacecraft” into NASA publications and syllabuses. Next.