It is the occupation of politicians to deny this ubiquity, nay, universality of corroded hearts, to discount the barren laboriousness of all paths. Reduce corporate taxes, they say, or redistribute th...
On the radio, Klavdia Sulzhenko sang The Blue Kerchief. The war had died; that song was getting old; then again, so was I. But
He was really quite addicted to her face, and yet for the longest time he could not remember it at all, it being so much brighter than sunlight on a pool of water that he could only recall that blindi...
He had always longed to let himself go, sinking and spinning into something greater than himself; and his mind quite naturally worked to consider every facet of every question; so when he was with Coc...
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...
Evil is one thing. Evil's only subjective. Illegal is another.
Do you want to know what happiness is? Happiness is the absence of unpleasant information. I
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...
But illusions don’t die all at once—
As a certain classical slaveholder once wrote, nothing is more painful than days of joy recollected in days of misery. So
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.
So many revolutionaries are intellectuals, a class of people whose aspirations tend to run ahead of their capabilities. Just
I've come to recognize that questions of law and justice are at the same time questions of power.
Perhaps the sallow drunk should have taken the hint. But he needed to feel confident in his life. It was only when he drank that he felt he could be anything. He felt this precisely because his percep...
L. Moholy-Nagy once wrote: Penetration of the body with light is one of the greatest visual experiences. And so I came back into my Germany, the real Germany, where the sunlight was as white as Heydri...
So even that doesn’t make you happy? What about your Seventh Symphony? At least it rallied people. Once you told me how alive you felt then; you said you gave it your all— Didn’t you learn in school,...
When they’d been children there’d been a fallen log in the river, and John had walked on it, keeping his balance, instructing his brother: If you don’t think about it, you won’t fall.—That would be a...
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...
When it comes to revolutionaries, trust only the sad ones. The enthusiastic ones are the oppressors of tomorrow.
I do most sincerely believe that ethical behavior as we best construe it ought to be followed by us throughout our lives, even on the last day of life, and that if we have made a bad or even evil choi...
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