Life is a system of recurrent pairs, the poison and the antidote being eternally packaged together by some considerate heavenly druggist.

All ideas advanced to deal with the Florentine noise problem, the Florentine traffic problem, are Utopian, and nobody believes in them, just as nobody believed in Machiavelli's Prince, a Utopian image of the ideally self-interested despot.

An unrectified case of injustice has a terrible way of lingering, restlessly, in the social atmosphere like an unfinished question.

Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted.

The relation between life and literature - a final antimony - is one of mutual plagiarism.

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 Crucifixion and other historical precedents notwithstanding, many of us still believe that outstanding goodness is a kind of armor, that virtue, seen plain and bare, gives pause to criminality. But perhaps it is the other way around.