Doctor, I will be as direct with you as I can. I have long and do still steadfastly believe that slavery is the great cause of all the chief evils of our land. It is a cancer eating at our bowels, the...
And what else did Christianity accomplish? he said. Here’s what Christianity accomplished. Christianity accomplished the mob. The mob. It accomplished not only your senseless butchery, the exterminati...
And then I blurted some words that a lifetime of general equilibrium, and a smug belief in the impregnability of my psychic health, had prevented me from believing I could ever utter; I was chilled as...
Such incomprehension has usually been due not to a failure of sympathy but to the basic inability of healthy people to imagine a form of torment so alien to everyday experience.
Sense of the triumph of life over death is at the core of The Myth of Sisyphus with its austere message: in the absence of hope we must still struggle to survive, and so we do—by the skin of our teeth...
More often than not the person one loves from whom one withholds the most searing truths about one’s self, if only out of the very human motive to spare groundless pain. But
History’s greatest liquidator of Jews, the thick-witted Heinrich Himmler, was a chicken farmer.
Greed is not a racial but a human prediliction and
Which is worse, past or future? Neither. I will fold up my mind like a leaf and drift on this stream over the brink. Which will be soon, and then the dark, and then be done with this ugliness...
That the word indescribable should present itself is not fortuitous, since it has to be emphasized that if the pain were readily describable most of the countless sufferers from this ancient afflictio...
It is I am sure a kind of unorthodoxy, and considered thus by some, I hear my master say (I resume my station, still flustered and with a madly working heart), but it is my conviction that the more re...
I never said I hated the Marine Corps! I only said it was no place for a sensitive, civilized, self-respecting human being.
I had now reached that phase of the disorder where all sense of hope had vanished, along with the idea of a futurity; my brain, in thrall to its outlaw hormones, had become less an organ of thought th...
I actually shivered at the insincerity that gripped me as I spoke these words: their falseness was shameful. I was sure my coolness would return. I'd just been caught with my guard down. But at the mo...
Hell, they’d say in the country club locker room, you know how Milt’s getting his. Everybody knew, bearing testimony to the fact that suburban vice, like a peeling nose, is almost impossible to concea...
For me the real healers were seclusion and time.
Dress is important. It's part of being human. It might as well be a thing of beauty, something you take real pleasure in doing. And maybe in the process, give other people pleasure. Though that's seco...
And I think it was a great Frenchman, Voltaire, who said that the beginning of wisdom is the moment when one understands how little concerned with one’s own life are other men, they who are so despera...
They appeared from where I stood as peaceful as two lovers who had gaily costumed themselves for an afternoon stroll, but on impulse had decided to lie down and nap, or kiss and make love, or merely w...
Eponymous