“One day an army of gray-haired women may quietly take over the Earth!” 

I wanted to be Michael Jackson as a kid.

If you look at the story of 'The Get Down,' it's the story of young people, unknowns thrown together by their resources, trying to create something.

“We have had no good comic operas of late, because the real world has been more comic than any possible opera.”

“To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.”

“Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before.”

“I agree with the realistic Irishman who said he preferred to prophesy after the event.” 

“Do not look at the faces in the illustrated papers. Look at the faces in the street.”

“Do not enjoy yourself. Enjoy dances and theaters and joy-rides and champagne and oysters; enjoy jazz and cocktails and night-clubs if you can enjoy nothing better; enjoy bigamy and burglary and any crime in the calendar, in preference to the other alternative; but never learn to enjoy yourself.

“This is the age in which thin and theoretic minorities can cover and conquer unconscious and untheoretic majorities.”

“The whole curse of the last century has been what is called the Swing of the Pendulum; that is, the idea that Man must go alternately from one extreme to the other. It is a shameful and even shocking fancy; it is the denial of the whole dignity of the mankind. When Man is alive he stands still. It is only when he is dead that he swings.”

“I still hold. . .that the suburbs ought to be either glorified by romance and religion or else destroyed by fire from heaven, or even by firebrands from the earth.” 

“Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision.”

“There is a corollary to the conception of being too proud to fight. It is that the humble have to do most of the fighting.” 

“It is hard to make government representative when it is also remote.”

“All government is an ugly necessity.”

“There cannot be a nation of millionaires, and there never has been a nation of Utopian comrades; but there have been any number of nations of tolerably contented peasants.” 

“It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.” 

“When a politician is in opposition he is an expert on the means to some end; and when he is in office he is an expert on the obstacles to it.” 

“With all that we hear of American hustle and hurry, it is rather strange that Americans seem to like to linger on longer words.”

“Puritanism was an honourable mood; it was a noble fad. In other words, it was a highly creditable mistake.”

“It has been often said, very truely, that religion is the thing that makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary; it is an equally important truth that religion is the thing that makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary.”

“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.”

If there were no God, there would be no atheists.”