The end was contained in the beginning.
Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.
Take away freedom of speech, and the creative faculties dry up.
If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones.
The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
Only old Benjamin professed to remember every detail of his long life and to know that things never had been, nor ever could be much better or much worse--hunger, hardship, and disappointment being, so he said, the unalterable law of life.