Nevertheless, one learned very early that books had to be respected; they were all putative Bibles and to some small degree had a share in holiness.

A suicide kills two people, that's what it's for!

Pathos truly is the mode for the pessimist. But tragedy requires a nicer balance between what is possible and what is impossible. And it is curious, although edifying, that the plays we revere, century after century, are the tragedies. In them, and in them alone, lies the belief-optimistic, if you will, in the perfectibility of man.

After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive.

I came out of a culture in which my uncle, my father - they were all salesmen of one kind or another. My father was a manufacturer. He also, in effect, had to sell that stuff. And if he didn't literally do it, his men did. So, selling was in the air through my boyhood. The whole idea of successfully selling was very important.

Whether for good or evil, it is sadly inevitable that all political leadership requires the artifices of theatrical illusion. In the politics of a democracy, the shortest distance between two points is often a crooked line.

...When the government goes into the business of destroying trust, it goes into the business of destroying itself.