Our imagination and reasoning powers facilitate anxiety; the anxious feeling is precipitated not by an absolute impending threat-such as the worry about an examination, a speech, travel-but rather by the symbolic and often unconscious representations.

Man, the most complicated of the animals, has a relatively short gestation period. Beyond that, he will be born, unlike most mammals, in a ridiculously helpless state.

Our imagination and reasoning powers facilitate anxiety; the anxious feeling is precipitated not by an absolute impending threat-such as the worry about an examination, a speech, travel-but rather by the symbolic and often unconscious representations.

Spare me therefore, your good intentions, your inner sensitivities, your unarticulated and unexpressed love. And spare me also these tedious psycho-historians which, by exposing the goodness inside the bad man, and the evil in the good-invariably establish a vulgar and perverse egalitarianism, as if the arrangement of what is outside and what inside makes no moral difference.

In a world where survival is always seen as a struggle, and in which some pitfalls always exist, if something brings into question our confidence in our own coping ability, it will threaten our safety.

A street thug and a paid killer are professionals - beasts of prey, if you will, who have dissociated themselves from the rest of humanity and can now see human beings in the same way that trout fishermen see trout.

When men achieve the fruits of their material success, they often become aware of an emptiness--an incompleteness--in their lives;the hollowness of having, but not raising, children, of not making true commitments to them. Which, sadly, does not mean that they weren't capable of it.