By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality.

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.

When evil is allowed to compete with good, evil has an emotional populist appeal that wins out unless good men and women stand as a vanguard against abuse.

Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.

This is the precept by which I have lived: Prepare for the worst; expect the best; and take what comes.

The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.

One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.

There is a strange interdependence between thoughtlessness and evil.

Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.

There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.

Only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

You can fall in love but can't escape love alive.

You are an atheist if you do not believe in yourself

To feel valued to know even if only once in a while that you can do a job well is an absolutely marvelous feeling.

I knew all the time I was going to get through the war. It was completely irrational, a silly idea, but I was not going to lie down and get myself killed. I was going to get out of it.

Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.

What [Prozac] does is completely annihilate the sexual drive, so the question of passion hardly arises.

In the beginning we must simplify the subject, thus unavoidably falsifying it, and later we must sophisticate away the falsely simple beginning.

There are a lot of homes for boys, but very few for girls, that is why I chose to do for girls.

One of the benefits of a bad education is the constant pleasure of discovery.

People forget what a big issue toilet training is for adults and kids, and it is not fun, especially when you're in a car on the interstate.