Do I grow cleverer with age, or does the world grow more stupid?

It is only by having desire thwarted, and thereby learning to control it — in other words, by becoming civilized — that men become fully human.

Do I grow cleverer with age, or does the world grow more stupid?

How many people does each of us know who claim to seek happiness but freely choose paths inevitably leading to misery?

There is something deeply attractive, at least to quite a lot of people, about squalor, misery, and vice. They are regarded as more authentic, and certainly more exciting, than cleanliness, happiness, and virtue.

The idea that freedom is merely the ability to act upon one's whims is surely very thin and hardly begins to capture the complexities of human existence; a man whose appetite is his law strikes us not as liberated but enslaved.

There is nothing an addict likes more, or that serves as better pretext for continuing his present way of life, than to place the weight of responsibility for his situation somewhere other than on his own decisions.