A Quote by John Irving

It was one of those ridiculous arrangements that couples make when they are separating, but before they are divorced - when they still imagine that children and property can be shared with more magnanimity than recrimination.
There is something that governments care for more than human life, and that is the security of property, and so it is through property that we shall strike the enemy.... Those of you who can break windows--break them. Those of you who can still further attack the secret idol of property, so as to make the Government realize that property is as greatly endangered by women's suffrage as it was by the Chartists of old--do so. And my last word is to the Government: I incite this meeting to rebellion!
There is absolutely no reason to suspect that prohibiting same-sex couples from marrying and refusing to recognize their out-of-state marriages will cause same-sex couples to raise fewer children or impel married opposite-sex couples to raise more children. The Virginia Marriage Laws therefore do not further Virginia's interest in channeling children into optimal families, even if we were to accept the dubious proposition that same-sex couples are less capable parents.
Couples who make it aren't the ones who never had a reason to get divorced; they are simply the ones who decided early on that their commitment to each other was always going to be bigger than their differences and their flaws.
The teachers of small children are paid more than they were, but still far less than the importance of their work deserves, and they are still regarded by the unenlightened majority as insignificant compared to those who impart information to older children and adolescents, a class of pupils which, in the nature of things, is vastly more able to protect its own individuality from the character of the teacher.
Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything -- anything -- be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in.
I would gladly chastise those who represent things as different from what they are. Those who steal property or make counterfeit money are punished, and those ought to be still more severely dealt with who steal away or falsify the good name of a prince.
Larry King has been married more times than Henry the Eighth. We used to have that rhyme to keep track of them. 'Divorced, beheaded, died. Divorced, beheaded, survived.' With Larry I think it goes, 'Divorced, beheaded, divorced, escaped. Zombie, lesbian, disappeared, inflatable.
Property must be secured or liberty cannot exist. But if unlimited or unbalanced power of disposing property, be put into the hands of those who have no property, France will find, as we have found, the lamb committed to the custody of the world. In such a case, all the pathetic exhortations and addresses of the national assembly to the people, to respect property, will be regarded no more than the warbles of the songsters of the forest.
What higher property do you have than your own person? I totally agree, by the way, with John Locke's idea that one's body is literally the most precious property that exists. I would say that conscription is the most heinous violation of property that one can imagine.
The arrangements that couples make in order to maintain civility in the midst of their journey to divorce are often most elaborate when the professed top priority is to protect a child.
In the nature of things, those who have no property and see their neighbors possess much more than they think them to need, cannot be favorable to laws made for the protection of property. When this class becomes numerous, it becomes clamorous. It looks on property as its prey and plunder, and is naturally ready, at times, for violence and revolution.
There is not a more dangerous experiment than to place property in the hands of one class, and political power in those of another... If property cannot retain the political power, the political power will draw after it the property.
Those who imagine that a politician would make a better figurehead than a hereditary monarch might perhaps make the acquaintance of more politicians.
All revolutions more or less threaten the tenure of property: but most of those who live in democratic countries are possessed of property - not only are they possessed of property but they live in the condition of men who set the greatest store upon their property.
The land on which the cattle grazed was communal property. It was owned by no one. It was nobody's private farm. It was the common property of the people, shared by the people. So the practice of sharing was central to the concept of ownership of property.
I know that some people believe Winston Churchill, magnanimity in victory. I've always believed magnanimity in defeat and then sneak up on 'em when they're not looking when you fire back. That's what I've always - magnanimity.
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