Learning . . . is - also an end in itself.

If a grasshopper tries to fight a lawnmower, one may admire his courage but not his judgement.

Art is the process of evoking pity and terror, which is not abstract at all but very human. What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudointellectual masturbation . . . whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce -- render emotional -- his audience, each time.

Are you trying to tell all of us we have a bad signal-to-noise ratio?

But if you didn't have more urgent things to do after supper [in boot camp], you could write a letter, loaf, gossip, discuss the myriad mental shortcomings of sergeants and, dearest of all, talk about the female of the species (we became convinced that there was no such creatures, just mythology created by inflamed imaginations - one boy in our company claimed to have seen a girl, over at regimental headquarters; he was unanimously judged a liar and a braggart).

The greatest fallacy of democracy is that everyone's opinion is worth the same.

For me, politeness is a sine qua non of civilization.