For human words are like shadows, and shadows are incapable of explaining light and between shadow and light there is the opaque body from which words are born.

Some people spend their entire lives reading but never get beyond reading the words on the page, they don't understand that the words are merely stepping stones placed across a fast-flowing river, and the reason they're there is so that we can reach the farther shore, it's the other side that matters...

The world had already changed before September 11. The world has been going through a process of change over the last 20 or 30 years. A civilization ends, another one begins.

Nothing so tires a person as having to struggle, not with himself, but with an abstraction.

...we confidently say that it's not worth trying to reach any conclusions merely because we decide to stop halfway along the path that would lead us straight to them.

Society has to change, but the political powers we have at the moment are not enough to effect this change. The whole democratic system would have to be rethought.

Beginning with adolescence, my political formation was oriented in the ideological direction of Marxism. It was natural, being that my thinking was influenced by an atmosphere of active critical resistance. That was the way it was during all of the dictatorship and up to the Revolution of 1974.