Leaders make things possible. Exceptional leaders make them inevitable.

Africa has a genious for extremes, for the beginning and the end. It seems simultaneously connected to some memory of Eden and to some foretaste of apocalypse. Nowhere is day more vivid or night darker. Nowhere are forests more luxuriant. Nowhere is there a continent more miserable

The kiss is a wordless articulation of desire whose object lies in the future, and somewhat to the south.

Never forget the power of silence, that massively disconcerting pause which goes on and on and may last induce an opponent to babble and backtrack nervously.

Handwriting is civilization's casual encephalogram.

One can live with the thought of one's own death. It is the thought of the death of the words and books that is terrifying for that is the deeper extinction.

Human ingenuity has given centuries to the goal of ensuring that the human body might move around at an even 68 degrees all year.