All working, practical political systems, even those professing to originate in moral grandeur, are based upon and operate by contempt of human life and the individual fate.

I can pray better when I'm comfortable.

We are born knowing death.

The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one's own even more, one's own, for that has been put in our care and we are responsible for its well-being.

I am in Paris. Yes ma'am , I made it back. I came up from Berlin, stopped here ten days, fought a losing battle against my deepest inclinations, pulled myself out by the hair and went to Madrid...Madrid is a lovely enchanting city, and there was almost ready for me a kind of penthouse full of sunlight, a roof garden, and so on. I gave one look at it all, returned to the hotel and went to bed and wept bitterly for eleven hours...Why? Because I had seen Paris and could not endure the thought of being anywhere else.

we do know now, all of us, that the most appalling cruelties are committed by apparently virtuous governments in expectation of a great good to come, never learning that the evil done now is the sure destroyer of the expected good.

There is no such thing as an exact synonym and no such thing as an unmixed motive.