Innovation is a twofold threat to academic mediocrities: it endangers their oracular authority, and it evokes the deeper fear that their whole, laboriously constructed intellectual edifice might collapse.

The life we led was a proof of man's capacity for adaptation.I think that even the condemned souls in purgatory after time develop a sort of homely routine.That is ,by the way, why most prison memoirs are unreadable.The difficulty of conveying to the reader an idea of a nightmare world from which he has emerged makes the author depict the prisoner's state of mind as an uninterruped continuity of despair.He fears to appear frivolous or to spoil his effect by admitting that even in the depths of misery cheerfulness keeps breaking in.

No writer or teacher or artist can escape the responsibility of influencing others whether he intends to or not, whether he is conscious of it or not.

Adolescence is a kind of emotional seasickness. Both are funny, but only in retrospect.

We know that virtue does not matter to history, and that crimes remain unpunished; but that every error had its consequences and venges itself unto the seventh generation.

The Régime did not want Communists; it wanted robots. It will take at least a generation to change them back into humans again.

Laughter and weeping, the Greek masks of comedy and tragedy, mark the extremes of a continuous spectrum; both provide channels for the overflow of emotion; both are