The shortest man, codenamed RIMSKY, said to me that freedom means understanding our place within the laws of history; we are more free when we acknowledge our submission to the law of gravity than whe...
The reformed addict who feels the craving almost believes in it, then merely smiles; that
Once again I choose to quote the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (If somebody were to ask why I believe that organization instead of one that made opposing claims, I suppose I would say: Ab...
More aid, better directed! Couldn't we all use that? And what if the universe enacts less aid, more poorly directed?
Frank thought. Each time he became someone else’s spy it got easier. The ideological virgin usually finds his first time an excruciating experience, just as an amateur hiker, used to the straight-and-...
But the remarkable thing about the beetles was their sensitivity to all the grammar and directives and slogans and even unstated desires of the ant world, which they learned to manipulate. They first...
When it comes to revolutionaries, trust only the sad ones. The enthusiastic ones are the oppressors of tomorrow.
What do you get when you cross a nymphomaniac with a kleptomaniac? A rapist, said Tyler.
Well let the gentlemen of the bourgeoisie remember Berlin any way they please. As Comrade Khruschev promised us, we will bury them.
We each must fulfill our own obligation.
Thus the protagonist of this Dream of mine is ooze, here and forever call'd
The things you love too much perish—After Shostakovich and Volkov, p. 78. The composer goes on: You have to treat everything with irony, especially the things you hold dear.
By your command, sir, I said. But Elena was still the one I loved. Knowing that I loved her, I knew who I was.
Bones, murdered or merely perished, ought to stay silent. That's the law. But, quick and shrill as a violin-screech, they come back, to the terror of all who stand guilty of living, and then they danc...
23 He dreamed that a bomb was singing to him. From far away, the bomb was coming to marry him. The bomb was his destiny, falling on him, screaming.
As a certain classical slaveholder once wrote, nothing is more painful than days of joy recollected in days of misery. So
Standing on your own feet, naturally, is as tiresome and dangerous as standing your ground; and when the wild dogs begin to circle grinning round you with their dripping tongues hanging out and you kn...
So then, in a pleading tone, he whispers: Why did you make me? I never wanted to be made… For propaganda, of course. It’s all in your own book. How can we persuade others to be good, without evil we c...
Self-deception is a pessimistic definition of optimism.
In the Hitler years we still believed in books enough to burn them. Imagine,