Here we write well when we expose frauds and hypocrites. We are great at counting warts and blemishes and weighting feet of clay. In expressing love, we belong among the underdeveloped countries.

People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.

I don't know exactly how it's done. I let it alone a good deal.

...America didn't have to fight scarcity and we all felt guilty before people who still had to struggle for bread and freedom in the old way ... We weren't starving, we weren't bugged by the police, locked up in madhouses for our ideas, arrested, deported, slave laborers sent to die in concentration camps. We were spared the holocausts and nights of terror. With our advantages we should be formulating the new basic questions for mankind. But instead we sleep. Just sleep and sleep, and eat and play and fuss and sleep again.

You can spend the entire second half of your life recovering from the mistakes of the first half.

The late philosopher Morris R. Cohen of CCNY was asked by a student in the metaphysics course, Professor Cohen, how do I know that I exist? The keen old prof replied, And who is asking?

Towards the end of your life you have something like a pain schedule to fill out - a long schedule like a federal document, only it's your pain schedule. Endless categories. First, physical causes - like arthritis, gallstones, menstrual cramps. New category, injured vanity, betrayal, swindle, injustice. But the hardest items of all have to do with love. The question then is: So why does everybody persist? If love cuts them up so much.