An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.

A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.

People can cry much easier than they can change, a rule of psychology people like me picked up as kids on the street.

Those kids aren't dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don't get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.

All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.