Frank Zappa was one of the gods of the Czech underground, I thought of him as a friend. Whenever I feel like escaping from the world of the Presidency, I think of him.

Nothing is more powerful than individuals acting out of their own conscience.

The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.

None of us know all the potentialities that slumber in the spirit of the population, or all the ways in which that population can surprise us when there is the right interplay of events.

There can be no doubt that distrust of words is less harmful than unwarranted trust in them.

The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning - in other words, of absurdity - the more energetically meaning is sought.

Someone who does not draw strength from himself and who is incapable of finding the meaning of his life within himself will...seek the map to his own orientation somewhere outside himself-in some ideology, organization, or society, and then, however active he may appear to be, he is merely waiting, depending. He waits to see what others will do, or what roles they will assign to him, and he depends on them-and if they don't do anything or if they botch things, he succumbs to disillusion, despair, and ultimately, resignation.