The United States needed a civil war to unite properly.

A library's ideal function is to be a little bit like a bouquiniste's stall, a place for trouvailles.

National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same.

But Italy is not an intellectual country. On the subway in Tokyo everybody reads. In Italy, they don't. Don't evaluate Italy from the fact that it produced Raphael and Michelangelo.

The truth is an anagram of an anagram.

Then why do you want to know?" "Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.

The truth is a young maiden as modest as she is beautiful, and therefore she is always seen cloaked.