If you are willing to take the punishment, you're halfway through the battle. That the issues may be trivial, the battle ugly, is another point.

Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.

But maybe half a lie is worse than a real lie.

Was it always my nature to take a bad time and block out the good times, until any success became an accident and failure seemed the only truth?

It doesn't pay well to fight for what we believe in.

Intellectuals can tell themselves anything, sell themselves any bill of goods, which is why they were so often patsies for the ruling classes in 19th-century France and England, or 20th-century Russia and America.

some people are democrats by choice, and some by necessity.