A whole population of strangers inhabited and shaped that little body, lived in that mind and controlled its wishes, dictated its thoughts...The name was an abstraction, a title arbitrarily given, like "France" or "England," to a collection, never long the same, of many individuals who were born, lived, and died within him, as the inhabitants of a country appear and disappear, but keep alive in their passage the identity of the nation to which they belong.

Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced.

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.

There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.

I was born wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born, and have made, in a curious way, the worst of both.

All that is needed is money and a candidate who can be coached to look sincere. Political principles and plans for specific action have come to lose most of their importance. The personality of the candidate, the way he is projected by the advertising experts, are the things that really matter.

There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.