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.

Liberty, as it is conceived by current opinion, has nothing inherent about it; it is a sort of gift or trust bestowed on the individual by the state pending good behavior.

I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you're older, I think, is that ... you really must make the self. It is absolutely useless to look for it, you won't find it, but it's possible in some sense to make it. I don't mean in the sense of making a mask, a Yeatsian mask. But you finally begin in some sense to make and choose the self you want.

Morality did not keep well; it required stable conditions; it was costly; it was subject to variations, and the market for it was uncertain.

The happy ending is our national belief.

The present can try to bury the past, an operation that is most atrocious when it is most successful.