Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.

I will try to cram these paragraphs full of facts and give them a weight and shape no greater than that of a cloud of blue butterflies.

To die quickly in one's eighth decade at the very top of one's powers is an enviable end, and not an occasion for mourning.

Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run.

The ingenuities we practice in order to appear admirable to ourselves would suffice to invent the telephone twice over on a rainy summer morning.

The guns of the big events rumble through our pages, but the tiny firecrackers are constantly hissing and popping there as well; it appears that much of my life as a journalist has been devoted to sedulously setting off firecrackers.

Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.