Some people write to please, to soothe, to console. Others to provoke, to challenge, to exasperate and infuriate. I've always found the second approach the more pleasing.

The world is older and bigger than we are. This is a hard truth for some folks to swallow.

Counterpart to the knee-jerk liberal is the new knee-pad conservative, always groveling before the rich and the powerful.

Not all questions can be answered.

Apuleius married a rich widow, then wrote _The Golden Ass_.

No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.

There has never yet been a human society worthy of the name of civilization. Civilization remains a remote ideal.