Life is a biography, not a series of disconnected moments, more or less pleasurable but increasingly tedious and unsatisfying unless one imposes a purposive pattern upon them.

If the history of the 20th Century proved anything, it proved that however bad things were, human ingenuity could usually find a way to make them worse.

I've heard a hundred different variations of instances of unadulterated female victimhood, yet the silence of the feminists is deafening. Where two pieties--feminism and multi-culturalism--come into conflict, the only way of preserving both is an indecent silence.

Turgenev saw human beings as individuals always endowed with consciousness, character, feelings, and moral strengths and weaknesses; Marx saw them always as snowflakes in an avalanche, as instances of general forces, as not yet fully human because utterly conditioned by their circumstances. Where Turgenev saw men, Marx saw classes of men; where Turgenev saw people, Marx saw the People. These two ways of looking at the world persist into our own time and profoundly affect, for better or for worse, the solutions we propose to our social problems.

The need always to lie and always to avoid the truth stripped everyone of what Custine called 'the two greatest gifts of God-the soul and the speech which communicates it.' People became hypocritical, cunning, mistrustful, cynical, silent, cruel, and indifferent to the fate of others as a result of the destruction of their own souls.

The aim of untold millions is to be free to do exactly as they choose and for someone else to pay when things go wrong.

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