I think ideology is toxic, all ideology. It's not that there are good ones and bad ones. All ideology is toxic, because ideology is a kind of insult to the gift of human free thinking.
Sadistic literature is not only inhumane. It is anti-human.
Failures to love are irremediable and irredeemable.
One of the uncovenanted benefits of living for a long time is that, having so many more dead than living friends, death can appear as a step backwards into the joyous past.
In what touches their social convictions, most persons do not think. The threat of change, with all it suggests to them in the loss of social and economic privilege, alarms so deeply that they are incapable of unprejudiced thought. They seem to themselves to be thinking, with lucidity and fairness, but since they start from the conviction that change must undoubtedly be for the worse or from settled grief at the thought of losing what is old and lovely, they are doing no more than following a logical sequence of ideas from a false premise.
. . . we do not remember people as they were. What we remember is the effect they had on us then, but we remember it through an emotion charged with all that has since happened to us.
Nothing lasts. Not even a great sorrow.
If only life were that simple; if one could jump to the good parts and flick through the bad.
He [george W. Bush] lived up - well, he was someone that I wouldn't have voted for. His policies were not mine.
One does not surrender a life in an instant. That which is lifelong can only be surrendered in a lifetime.
Hitler had an unprecedented opportunity, such as no man will ever again be offered so easily, to create something entirely new. However, besides the fact that he knows absolutely nothing about matters economic, he cannot even fully understand his economic advisers. . . . His constant worry has ever been to keep himself in power. . . . He believes that he alone is a great man, and all others non-entities.