With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves.

Never have the young taken themselves so seriously, and the calamity is that they are listened to and deferred to by so many adults.

Free men are aware of the imperfection inherent in human affairs, and they are willing to fight and die for that which is not perfect. They know that basic human problems can have no final solutions, that our freedom, justice, equality, etc. are far from absolute, and that the good life is compounded of half measures, compromises, lesser evils, and gropings toward the perfect. The rejection of approximations and the insistence on absolutes are the manifestation of a nihilism that loathes freedom, tolerance, and equity.

The unpredictability inherent in human affairs is due largely to the fact that the by-products of a human process are more fateful than the product.

Self-esteem and self-contempt have specific odors; they can be smelled.

Totalitarianism spells simplification: an enormous reduction in the variety of aims, motives, interests, human types, and, above all, in the categories and units of power.

People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them.