A cult is a religion with no political power.
Tom Wolfe

A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.
Tom Wolfe

At the outset, at least, all three groups had something else to recommend them, as well: They were headquartered 3,000 miles away from the East Side of Manhattan.
Tom Wolfe

Frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can't see a painting.
Tom Wolfe

If a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested.
Tom Wolfe

It is very comforting to believe that leaders who do terrible things are, in fact, mad. That way, all we have to do is make sure we don't put psychotics in high places and we've got the problem solved.
Tom Wolfe

Love is the ultimate expression of the will to live.
Tom Wolfe

On Wall Street he and a few others - how many? three hundred, four hundred, five hundred? had become precisely that... Masters of the Universe.
Tom Wolfe

Radical Chic, after all, is only radical in Style; in its heart it is part of Society and its traditions.
Tom Wolfe

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.
Tom Wolfe


The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.
Tom Wolfe

The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.
Tom Wolfe

The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.
Tom Wolfe

There are some people who have the quality of richness and joy in them and they communicate it to everything they touch. It is first of all a physical quality; then it is a quality of the spirit.
Tom Wolfe

There has been a time on earth when poets had been young and dead and famous - and were men. But now the poet as the tragic child of grandeur and destiny had changed. The child of genius was a woman, now, and the man was gone.
Tom Wolfe

There is no spectacle on earth more appealing than that of a beautiful woman in the act of cooking dinner for someone she loves.
Tom Wolfe

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.
Tom Wolfe

We are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we're in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past.
Tom Wolfe

We are now in the Me Decade - seeing the upward roll of the third great religious wave in American history.
Tom Wolfe