The thing that impresses me most about this country is its hopefulness. It is this which distinguishes it from Europe, where there is hopeless depression and fear.

Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.

The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.

Knowledge is an affair of symbols and is, all too often, a hindrance to wisdom, the uncovering of the self from moment to moment

That’s what the human brain is there for—to turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols. Sometimes the symbols correspond fairly closely to some of the aspects of the external reality behind our experience; then you have science and common sense. Sometimes, on the contrary, the symbols have almost no connection with external reality; then you have paranoia and delirium. More often there’s a mixture, part realistic and part fantastic; that’s religion.

Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.

Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence - those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.