To use the past to justify the present is bad enough—but it’s just as bad to use the present to justify the past.

If the charter of your liberties entails death and despair for untold multitudes, then it is nothing but a license for slaughter.

To use the past to justify the present is bad enough—but it’s just as bad to use the present to justify the past.

You see, in our family we don't know whether we're coming or going - it's all my grandmother's fault. But, of course, the fault wasn't hers at all: it lay in language. Every language assumes a centrality, a fixed and settled point to go away from and come back to, and what my grandmother was looking for was a word for a journey which was not a coming or a going at all; a journey that was a search for precisely that fixed point which permits the proper use of verbs of movement.

What would it be like if I had something to defend - a home, a country, a family - and I found myself attacked by these ghostly men, these trusting boys? How do you fight an enemy who fights with neither enmity nor anger but in submission to orders from superiors, without protest and without conscience?

I know nothing of this silence except that it lies outside the reach of my intelligence, beyond words - that is why this silence must win, must inevitably defeat me, because it is not a presence at all.

The government to you is what God is to agnostics--only to be invoked when your own well being is at stake.