The nation which once held the creed that greatness is achieved by production, is now told that it is achieved by squalor.
He never felt lonliness except when he was happy.
You are damned, and we wish to share your damnation.
I don’t wish to be the symbol of anything. I’m only myself.
I want to know that I’ve accomplished something. I want to feel that it had some meaning. At the last summing up, I want to be sure it wasn’t all-for nothing.
If you know that this life is all that you have, wouldn’t you make the most of it?
I don’t want to see you. I don’t like you. I don’t like your face. You look like an insufferable egotist. You’re impertinent. You’re too sure of yourself. Twenty years ago I would have punched your face with the greatest of pleasure.
Because the beauty of the human body is that it hasn’t a single muscle which doesn’t serve its purpose; that there’s not a line wasted; that every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a man.
Kira, the highest thing in man is not his god. It’s that in him which knows the reverence due a god. And you, Kira, are my highest reverence...
You have no choice about your capacity to feel that something is good for you or evil, but what you will consider good or evil, what will give you joy or pain, what you will love or hate, desire or fear, depends on your standard of value.
It’s so graceless, being a martyr. It’s honoring your adversaries too much.
The only thing that matters, my goal, my reward, my beginning, my end, is the work itself. My work, done my way. A private, personal, selfish, egotistical motivation. That’s the only way I function. That’s all I am.
Why no. I’m too conceited. If you want to call it that. I don’t make comparisons. I never think of myself in relation to anyone else. I just refuse to measure myself as part of anything. I’m an utter egotist.
We didn’t really have to take everything so seriously, did we?
It’s not that I don’t suffer, it’s that I know the unimportance of suffering. I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one’s soul and as a permanent scar across one’s view of existence.
You will follow me, if we are what we are, you and I, if we live, if the world exists, if you know the meaning of this moment and can’t let it slip by, as others let it slip, into the senselessness of the unwilled and unreached.
She was incapable of love for any object not of her own choice and she resented anyone’s demand for it.
Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone’s work prove greater than their own – they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal – for a mind to respect and an achievement to admire.
Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade...
That time and those people are upon you!