In science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality.

The perennial wonder of Venice is to peer at herself in her canals and find that she exists-incredible as it seems. It is the same reassurance that a looking-glass offers us: the guarantee that we are real.

Our language, once homely and colloquial, seeks to aggrandize our meanest activities with polysyllabic terms or it retreats from frankness into a stammering verbosity.

A good deal of education consists of unlearning-the breaking of bad habits as with a tennis serve.

I'm afraid I'm not sufficiently inhibited about the things that other women are inhibited about for me. They feel that you've given away trade secrets.

Once the state is looked upon as the source of rights, rather than their bound protector, freedom becomes conditional on the pleasure of the state.

In moments of despair, we look on ourselves lead-enly as objects; we see ourselves, our lives, as someone else might see them and may even be driven to kill ourselves if the separation, the "knowledge," seems sufficiently final.