War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.

Wherever people feel safe — they will be indifferent.

American energy. . . is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed by chronic cultural dislocations which must be, for the most part, ferociously sublimated. This energy has mainly been sublimated into crude materialism

One criticizes in others what one recognizes and despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another’s ambitiousness.

Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.

Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality and of realism.

The Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one.