The Nazis had persecuted the Communists and nearly destroyed the Soviet Union, which had then been fully justified in exacting reparations, and America had diverted scarce resources from its own oppressed working class and sent them to West Germany to create an illusion of prosperity, luring weak and misguided East Germans across the border.

In theory, psychologists were unnecessary in the Republic of Bad Taste, because neurosis was a bourgeois malady, a morbid expression of contradictions that by definition could not exist in a perfect worker's state.

[...] If time was infinite, then three seconds and three years represented the same infinitely small fraction of it. And so, if inflicting three years of fear and suffering was wrong, as everyone would agree, then inflicting three seconds of it was no less wrong. He caught a fleeting glimpse of God in the math here, in that infinitesimal duration of a life. No death could be quick enough to excuse inflicting pain. If you were capable of doing the math, it meant that a morality was lurking in it.

[...] Every facet of Amarillo a testament to a nation of bad-ass firsts: first in prison population, first in meat consumption, first in operational strategic warheads, first in per-capita carbon emissions, first in line for the Rapture. [...]

Kaczynski had been barred from serving as his own counsel at his trial, effectively muzzled from airing his radical opinions about the U.S. government, by reason of insanity. And the proof of his insanity? His belief that the U.S. government was a repressive conspiracy that muzzled radical opinion.

When Charles's several honeymoons had ended, he settled down to write the big book, the novel that would secure him his place in the modern American canon. Once upon a time, it had sufficed to write The Sound and the Fury or The Sun Also Rises. But now bigness was essential. Thickness, length. Leila would have been well advised, before marrying a novelist or imagining herself as one, to wait and sample life in a house where a big book was being contemplated. A day of frustration was mourned with three large bourbons. A day of conceptual breakthrough and euphoria was celebrated with four large bourbons. [...]

She went to conferences with him and performed what she was too slow to realize was her function at them: to be younger and fresh and somewhat exotic, to excite the envy of male writers who hadn't traded in their wives yet or hadn't done so recently.

[...] Charles' big book had been published just the week before and was getting slaughtered by reviewers ("bloated and immensely disagreeable" Michiko Kakutani, New York Times) [...]

[...] Although that time was long gone, they'd never formally acknowledged its passing--so much remained unspoken behind the glare on Tom's glasses--and Leila couldn't help feeling hurt that he'd unilaterally acknowledged it by inviting the girl to live with him.

[...] the false promise of the Internet and social media as substitutes for journalism--the idea that you didn't need Washington journalists when you could read the tweets of congressmen, didn't need news photographers when everyone carried a, phone with a camera, didn't need to pay professionals when you could crowdsource, didn't need investigative reporting when giants like Assange and Wolf and Snowden walked the earth ...