In Holland, everyone is an expert in painting and in tulips.

A fate is not a punishment.

So the thing that bothered me most was that the condemned man had to hope the machine would work the first time.

The day of my arrest I was first put in a room where there were already several other prisoners, most of them Arabs. They laughed when they saw me. Then they asked what I was in for. I said I'd killed an Arab and they were all silent

Moreover, most people, assuming they had not altogether abandoned religious observances, or did not combine them naively with a thoroughly immoral way of living, had replace normal religious practice by more or less extravagant superstitions.

If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy.

I am alive again, now that I can no longer stand to live.