If you talked or laughed in church, told lies, had impure thoughts or conversations, you were bad; if you obeyed your parents or guardians, went to confession and communion regularly, said prayers for the dead, you were good.

In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.

The things of this world reveal their essential absurdity when they are put in the Venetian context. In the unreal realm of the canals, as in a Swiftian Lilliput, the real world, with its contrivances, appears as a vast folly.

A politician or political thinker who calls himself a political realist is usually boasting that he sees politics, so to speak, in the raw; he is generally a proclaimed cynic and pessimist who makes it his business to look behind words and fine speeches for the motive. This motive is always low.

Sex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character.

Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.

Life for the European is a career; for the American it is a hazard.