Do not regulate the private lives of people because, if you do, they will become angry and antisocial, and they will get what they want from criminals who work in perfect freedom because they know how to pay off the police.
In politics, as in love, opposites attract, and the misunderstandings that ensue tend to be as bitter and, as in love, as equally terminal.
Con todo, ni siquiera yo puedo crear un personaje imaginado que resulte tan unidimensional como el lector corriente.
Soon he would move on.
The tragedy of the United States, thus far in this century, is not the crack-up of an empire, which we never knew what to do with in the first place, but the collapse of the idea of the citizen as someone autonomous whose private life is not subject to orders from above.
Contrary to accepted legend, the Philadelphians did not at all mind the presence of the British army in their city; in fact, many of them hoped that Washington would soon be caught and hanged, putting an end to those disruptions and discomforts which had been set in motion by the ambitions of a number of greedy and vain lawyers shrewdly able to use as cover for their private designs Jefferson’s high-minded platitudes and cloudy political theorizings. Shortly.
We do not want to old to be sharper than we. It is bad enough that they were there first, and got the best things.
Democritus is studying philosophy here at Athens. This means that he delights in quarrels.
But like so many others nowadays, poor Julian wanted to believe that man’s life is profoundly more significant than it is. His sickness was the sickness of our age. We want so much not to be extinguished at the end that we will go to any length to make conjuror-tricks for one another simply to obscure the bitter, secret knowledge that it is our fate not to be.
After politics, journalism has always been the preferred career of the ambitious but lazy second-rater.
As I now move, graciously, I hope, towards the door marked Exit, it occurs to me that the only thing I ever really liked to do was go to the movies.
Journalism and popular fiction have merged, and the graphic and the plausible have become an end in themselves. The contemporary public plainly prefers mirrors to windows.
As long as any group within the society deliberately maintains its identity it is, or should be, a fair target for satire – both for its own good and for the society’s.
Wilson was very much school of Montaigne. Like Montaigne, he was not exactly misogynistic but he felt that the challenge of another male mind was the highest sort of human exchange while possession of a beautiful woman was also of intense importance to him.
It is my task always to know, particularly when I don’t.
I said it. I like to quote myself. I am not modest.
They say that to know oneself is to know all there is that is human. But of course no one can ever know himself. Nothing human is fully calculable; even to ourselves we are strange.
Now-a-days lower Broadway is blocked with traffic at this hour and everyone walks; even the decrepit John Jacob Astor can be seen crawling along the street like some ancient snail, his viscous track the allure of money. Instead.
After acquiring Texas, Polk deliberately started a war with Mexico because, as he later told the historian George Bancroft, we had to acquire California. Thanks to Polk, we did.
Apathy is just a lack of energy, which to me, is just the literal definition of decadence. So the energy gives out in a society – that is decadence.