Memoirs

"The Mississippi is well worth reading about. It is not a commonplace river, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable. Considering the Missouri its main branch, it is the longest river in the world — four thousand three hundred miles. It seems safe to say that it is also the crookedest river in the world, since in one part of its journey it uses up one thousand three hundred miles to cover the same ground that the crow would fly over in six hundred and seventy-five."

"The world and the books are so accustomed to use, and over-use, the word 'new' in connection with our country, that we early get and permanently retain the impression that there is nothing old about it."

"Sired by a hurricane, dam'd by an earthquake."

"When I'm playful I use the meridians of longitude and parallels of latitude for a seine, and drag the Atlantic Ocean for whales! I scratch my head with the lightning, and purr myself to sleep with the thunder!"

"Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates."

"I was gratified to be able to answer promptly and I did. I said I didn't know."

"Your true pilot cares nothing about anything on earth but the river, and his pride in his occupation surpasses the pride of kings."

"By the Shadow of Death, but he's a lightning pilot!"

"Here is a proud devil, thought I; here is a limb of Satan that would rather send us all to destruction than put himself under obligations to me, because I am not yet one of the salt of the earth and privileged to snub captains and lord it over everything dead and alive in a steamboat."

"I felt like a skinful of dry bones and all of them trying to ache at once."

"You can depend on it, I'll learn him or kill him."

"The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book — a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day."

"No, the romance and beauty were all gone from the river. All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat. Since those days, I have pitied doctors from my heart. What does the lovely flush in a beauty's cheek mean to a doctor but a "break" that ripples above some deadly disease? Are not all her visible charms sown thick with what are to him the signs and symbols of hidden decay? Does he ever see her beauty at all, or doesn't he simply view her professionally, and comment upon her unwholesome condition all to himself? And doesn't he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade?"

"In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oölitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact."

"Give an Irishman lager for a month, and he's a dead man. An Irishman is lined with copper, and the beer corrodes it. But whiskey polishes the copper and is the saving of him, sir."

"You take the lies out of him, and he'll shrink to the size of your hat; you take the malice out of him, and he'll disappear."

"I've worked up a business here that would satisfy any man, don't care who he is. Five years ago, lodged in an attic; live in a swell house now, with a mansard roof, and all the modern inconveniences."

"I found the half-forgotten Southern intonations and elisions as pleasing to my ear as they had formerly been. A Southerner talks music. At least it is music to me, but then I was born in the South. The educated Southerner has no use for an r, except at the beginning of a word."

"In the South the war is what A.D. is elsewhere; they date from it."

"War talk by men who have been in a war is always interesting; whereas moon talk by a poet who has not been in the moon is likely to be dull."

"Sir Walter [Scott] had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war."

"One of the pilots whom I had known when I was on the river had died a very honorable death. His boat caught fire, and he remained at the wheel until he got her safe to land. Then he went out over the breast-board with his clothing in flames, and was the last person to get ashore. He died from his injuries in the course of two or three hours, and his was the only life lost. The history of Mississippi piloting affords six or seven instances of this sort of martyrdom, and half a hundred instances of escapes from a like fate which came within a second or two of being fatally too late; But there is no instance of a pilot deserting his post to save his life while by remaining and sacrificing it he might secure other lives from destruction. It is well worth while to set down this noble fact, and well worth while to put it in italics, too."

"The letter was a pure swindle, and that is the truth. And take it by and large, it was without a compeer among swindles. It was perfect, it was rounded, symmetrical, complete, colossal!"

"And Men seye in theise Contrees, that Philosophres som tyme wenten upon theise Hilles, and helden to here Nose a Spounge moysted with Watre, for to have Eyr; for the Eyr above was so drye. And aboven, in the Dust and in the Powder of tho Hilles, thei wroot Lettres and Figures with hire Fingres: and at the zeres end thei comen azen, and founden the same Lettres and Figures, the whiche thei hadde writen the zeer before, withouten ony defaute."

"This Ryvere comethe rennynge from Paradys terrestre, betwene the Desertes of Ynde; and aftre it smytt unto Londe, and rennethe longe tyme many grete Contrees undre Erthe: And aftre it gothe out undre an highe Hille, that Men clepen Alothe, that is betwene Ynde and Ethiope, the distance of five Moneths Journeyes fro the entree of Ethiope. And aftre it envyronnethe alle Ethiope and Morekane, and gothe alle along fro the Lond of Egipte, unto the Cytee of Alisandre, to the ende of Egipte; and there it fallethe into the See."

"I have herd cownted, whan I was zong; how a worthi man departed somtyme from oure Contrees, for to go serche the World. And so he passed Ynde, and the Yles bezonde Ynde, where ben mo than 5000 Yles: and so longe he wente be See and Lond, and so enviround the World be many seysons, that he fond an Yle, where he herde speke his owne Langage, callynge on Oxen in the Plowghe, suche Wordes as men speken to Bestes in his owne Contree: whereof he hadde gret Mervayle: for he knewe not how it myghte be. But I seye, that he had gon so longe, be Londe and be See, that he had envyround alle the Erthe, that he was comen azen envirounynge, that is to seye, goynge aboute, unto his owne Marches, zif he wolde have passed forthe, till he had founden his Contree and his owne knouleche. But he turned azen from thens, from whens he was come fro."

"For fro what partie of the Erthe, that men duelle, outher aboven or benethen, it semethe always to hem that duellen, that thei gon more righte than ony other folk. And righte as it semethe to us, that thei ben undre us, righte so it semethe hem, that wee ben undre hem."

"Sir John Mandeville [was] an encyclopedist whose mostly invented stories still ring true, thanks to his gift for writing the first realistic Western fiction since Petronius. We do not know who this man was or even what language he wrote in, but modern textual analysis suggests that he rarely left his study. Rather than travel, he scavenged and plagiarized the works of others, improving their prose as he claimed their discoveries. In a period of continental isolation, Mandeville satisfied Europe's appetite for news by making up an East that sounded real. In expanding editions and translations, his Voyages and Travels became the most popular prose book of the Middle Ages."

"The work deserved its success for its own merits, for despite the narration of many marvellous sights, the author remained urbane and tolerant. He was a superb storyteller with a vivid imagination, who was able to combine the novel with the familiar, and moral exhortation with entertainment."

"I trust my readers will join me in grandly ignoring the complaints of sour-faced and grumpish scholars that "no such person" ever existed and that his Boke of Voiages and Travailes is a hoax and a forgery. What do they know, the old frumps, who have never dared emerge from their dusty libraries to tread the heaving quarterdeck and raise sail for Golden Ind, and Far Cathay, and the Islands of Prester John?"

"...love alone will not save someone from depression. You cannot simply love someone back to the safe ground of wellness (oh, that we could!). But you can love someone enough to seek, advocate, and fight for medical treatment. ...that love--a love that drives you to fight for the life of your loved one--"

"I don't choose to act this way or that. I don't choose to have crushing depression or extreme manias. ...I don't choose to sometimes feel like killing myself. Why did I do the things that I did in my life? Did I ever have the choice? I was given a gift and a curse at the same time, and the only choice I have ever had is how to accept it. I feel because I feel, and sometimes my feelings are more extreme than most people can imagine, but I always try my best. ...I never chose this. ...Mental illness...is real and it is painful and it is powerful."

"Telling her that she could do anything she wanted and that she had it all going for her didn't help. ...I knew that telling her that didn't make her believe it. In fact, it probably made it worse."

"For the longest time I thought my mom was all I needed, but there were other things that I needed to talk about that I didn't feel comfortable telling her. I still can't talk about drinking with my mom. Not that she would judge me, but out of my own fear of not seeming perfect. Plus, I want to be an adult and I don't want to rely on her for everything."

"I'm becoming a worse person the longer I try to stay normal."

"There were many layers in my relationship with her during the first years of her illness... The first was love, that all-encompassing love for a child that will not let go and will not give up.... The next layer was the clinical professional layer, always trying to analyze and figure out what the hell was going on, because if I could figure it out then I would have a chance to fix it. ....there was the paranoid alert layer, always questioning whether I was overreacting or being too protective, worrying that I was filtering everything through my own past. And finally there was terrifying fear. It was always there, lurking down deep, panicked that I could lose a child."

"The tears were lessening, she was no longer crying all the time, but she was certainly far from happy. There was no joy in this daughter of mine. She stepped slowly through her days without noticing life. She was trying so hard, but she could not move fully out of this low, low place that she was in."

"I could be there for her and I could be with her when she needed me, but I couldn't be in her. This was her battle and we could only support her in that fight. ...but I could not keep her safe every minute of every day."

"I was proud of who she was, not what she did. I let go. I let go."

"I have tried both prescribed help, like prescribed medication, and "self-help," better known as drug abuse. I had given up on the healthy choice many times, but that night, something within me prevailed. It reminded me that addiction was a longer, harder road than prescriptions, even if the prescriptions were at times unpredictable."

"One year ago I would have had to take Adderall or coke to feel this way. I would have had to be manic. But now I merely am happy. I am real and feel as though there is a point to the world. I feel as if I am meant to be here. I am meant to live and love and learn."

"I didn't allow myself to make any plans for her future. She would have to make these decisions herself."

"But in the end, it was only Linea who could grasp her life. We could support her always, and get out of the way as she moved to independence, yet still be there when she asked us to."

"It is hard to parent from the middle, but the middle is the only place you can parent an adult child. Adult child--what a contradiction for both the adult child and the parent. Let go. Help. Give advice. Don't. We struggle to figure out the dance in a way that will leave us both intact."

"True friendships last. They take work and forgiveness and more talking than some people can give. But in the end, friends care. It's just that sometimes they don't know how to deal with it."

"In this journey I am reminded to relish each moment of peace and joy and believe that more such moments are coming. Life goes on with all its unpredictable pain, and also with joyous surprises. My work is to let go of the fear and agony of the past few years and to trust in the future."

"...an illness called "bipolar disorder"...doesn't define us. It has challenged us and, in so many ways, enriched our lives. We have not turned away from loving each other."

"...suicide is not something selfish. It is not something you choose. It comes at you, a force of its own that you may be able to ward off, but that can take hold of you, stealing your power to fight it off. It is so strong that you have to fight with your entire self to keep it at bay. It is something that many cannot fight when their illness takes control. Suicide is a symptom of illnesses that may be preventable with treatment."

"...I was not my bipolar. I realized the power of words. I realized that by saying "I have bipolar" instead of "I am bipolar," I was myself with an illness, not myself defined by my illness."

"It is important to be honest with yourself and your life. It is important to share your truth so that we can all learn from one another ...It is important for our youth to know what this illness is so that they can create a world free of stigma. A world where people can share their feelings and worries. Where an illness of the brain is as important as an illness of the body. We must share our truths."

"They say the sea is actually black and that it merely reflects the blue sky above. So it was with me. I allowed you to admire yourself in my eyes. I provided a service. I listened and listened and listened. You stored yourself in me."

"Romance has killed more people than Cancer. Ok…maybe not killed but dulled more lives. Removed more hope, sold more medication, caused more tears"

"Hurt people hurt people more skillfully. An expert heartbreaker knows the effect of each incision. The blade slips in barely noticed, the pain and the apology delivered at the same time."

"Maybe there is a law after all. Of nature. Like gravity. An unwritten axiom that governs our emotional dealings. What you do comes back to you with twice the force, fuck it, three times the force. We are not punished for our sins we are punished by them."

"In New York, everyone just looks hurt. It seems more honest. Maybe I just identified with them."

"I'd meet the women the first night and get the obligatory phone number and then after another couple of days, making them sweat a little, I'd call and be all nervous. They loved that. I'd ask them out and pretend I hardly ever did "this kind of thing', I hadn't been out a lot in London because I didn't really know the scene."

"My logic went as follows: If someone hurts you then you automatically want revenge. It doesn’t matter how long it takes, you want revenge. I thought, if I hurt her enough she would want revenge. Therefore, I wouldn’t have to worry about never seeing her again. Because that is what I feared most. The fact that I was losing her."

"They say you’re not punished for your sins, you’re punished by them."

"You can’t hurt a man with a pinprick when he’s already got a spear in his chest.She was very attentive. That was it. She knew how to handle a guy. She made you feel like it was okay to be a guy. To be yourself. This, it seems to me, is the most devastating weapon of all in a woman's arsenal. If you can encourage the man to be himself, to give you his character, his ways, then you know how to navigate him, and therefore, he will never be able to hide from you."

"I heard someone say somewhere that it's possible to write the sickness out of yourself. And who knows, maybe someone will benefit."

"The very fact that they were naturally caring and loving would be the milestone that weighed them down. The formula is perfect. The nurse becomes willing to sacrifice herself in the patient. But the patient isn’t suffering from an external illness, he’s suffering from self-inflicted wounds. The nurse wants to prevent him from this pain. The patient wants her to feel the pain, too"

"She was very attentive. That was it. She knew how to handle a guy. She made you feel like it was okay to be a guy. To be yourself. This, it seems to me, is the most devastating weapon of all in a woman's arsenal. If you can encourage the man to be himself, to give you his character, his ways, then you know how to navigate him, and therefore, he will never be able to hide from you"

"Only then will it be possible to work jointly to find and travel the road from individualism to socialism without revolution, without the destruction of the most precious treasures, without annihilation of irreplaceable lives, and without regression to a lower level of civilization and culture as well as a lower standard of living and life in general."

"Then the highbrows appear on the scene and appeal to the law and the authority of tradition. These legitimists do not see that this law and this tradition were born in individualist thinking and are the pillars of a past time. What counts is to establish new laws and new authority in place of old traditions. If this is not done, they will find that the road to socialist reconstruction will not be traveled according to plan and peaceably, but that the revolution will topple these pillars, bringing down the structure of individualism. But most of them have never even read Marx, and they view Bolshevik revolution as a private Russian affair."

"Here you see the difference between the former age of individualism and the socialism that is on the horizon."

"In socialism of the future…what counts is the whole, the community of the Volk. The individual and his life play only a subsidiary role. He can be sacrificed—he is prepared to sacrifice himself should the whole demand it, should the commonwealth call for it."

"Aren’t these liberals, those reprobate defenders of individualism, ashamed to see the tears of the mothers and wives, or don’t these cold-blooded accountants even notice? Have they already grown so inhuman that they are no longer capable of feeling? It is understandable why bolshevism simply removed such creatures. They were worthless to humanity, nothing but an encumbrance to their Volk. Even the bees get rid of the drones when they can no longer be of service to the hive. The Bolshevik procedures are thus quite natural."

"But that's precisely the problem we have set out to solve: to convert the German Volk to socialism without simply killing off the old individualists, without destruction of property and values,…"

"We are living in an age of great radical change, as I have said before—an evolution from individualism to socialism, from self-interest to the public interest, from the ‘I’ to the ‘we.’"

"But we National Socialists wish precisely to attract all socialists, even the Communists; we wish to win them over from their international camp to the national one."

"Once the ruling power is in our grasp, we must seize the evil in Germany by the root and tear it out, to make way for true socialism, for the new faith, for the new religion."

"I also admit that we must not completely bury our heads in the sand in the face of those forces in the world which will try to defend liberalism and individualism. For they, too, have made a religion of those concepts. As long as only those with a vested interest in economic liberalism are at the helm in the authoritarian democracies—which are really not democracies at all—and in nations dominated by capitalism—where the word democracy is derived, not from demos, the people, but from daemon, the devil: until then they will wage war against socialism; and when there is no other choice, they will drive their peoples and their youth to the slaughtering block for the sake of their economic power, for their money bags, for base mammon. And the people will be stupid enough, and will be kept stupid enough, to go to war in the belief that they are fighting for their fatherland. But they are fighting only to maintain the domination of capital over labor and for the interest paid on that capital."

"Public need before private greed."

"But perhaps it is easier to preach and find prophets for a socialism that corresponds to Marxist ideas or present-day communism than for the synthesis of reason that has the goal of putting the given traits of humanity in the service of the people."

"Communism results in a welfare state where the standards are averaged downward. We want a state that allows for free development of the personality, but in the last analysis, this must also be for the needs of the people—that is, in the service of the community, where the standard is to be raised as high as possible, and then higher yet."

"I have studied with great interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock. But the possibility of excess and error is still no proof of the incorrectness of these laws."

"Individualism, which is in the process of being replaced by socialism—and we’re determined to lend a helping hand to abolish and replace it—is actually already being buried by industrialization… For thanks to growing industrialism, with all its consequences—associations, corporations, trusts, and monopolies—actually only a very few people are left who might imagine themselves to be living their individual lives."

"And our synthesis is not a compromise… it is, instead, the radical removal of all the false results of industrialization and unrestrained economic liberalism, and the redirection of this line of development to the service of humanity and the individual."

"What Marxism, Leninism, and Stalinism failed to accomplish, we shall be in a position to achieve."

"There also exists a constructive international socialist idea. But it is altogether different. For, look here, once nations have begun to carry out a socialist and socio-economic reorganization within their own borders, the time is ripe for totality of nations—that is, all the peoples and states—to give up fighting each other for power and supremacy, enslavement and exploitation,…"

"But first, there will have to be national socialism. Otherwise the people and their governments are not ready for the socialism of nations. It is not possible to be liberal to one’s own country and demand socialism among nations."

"After all, that’s exactly why we call ourselves National Socialists! We want to start by implementing socialism in our nation among our Volk! It is not until the individual nations are socialist that they can address themselves to international socialism."

"For we [National Socialists] too are considered ‘upstarts’ and ‘leftists’ by those same reactionaries. They are only too eager to apply such terms as ‘enemies of the fatherland,’ ‘Bolsheviks,’ and ‘inferiors.’”"

"The oldest dictatorship in the world exists in Cuba, and left wing dictatorships, like those of the right, have repugnant disdain for human rights."

"My response to those who still try to justify Castro's tyranny with the excuse that he has built schools and hospitals is this: Stalin, Hitler, and Pinochet also built schools and hospitals, and like Castro, they also tortured and assassinated opponents. They built concentration and extermination camps and eradicated all liberties, committing the worst crimes against humanity."

"There were nights when there would be ten or twelve executions. You would hear the bars of the man's cell door and someone coming to the bars to see his friend and cry out to him the last goodbye. There was no way to sleep in the galeras. That was when God began to become a constant companion of mine, and when death became a door into the true life, a step from the shadows into eternal light."

"Castro, the very man who had declared a thousand times that he was not a Communist and that "the Revolution is greener than palm trees," had stripped off the disguise that had fooled so many people and now had proclaimed the true nature of the Revolution, the nature it had from the beginning: "This is a socialist revolution," He said. "And we will defend it with these rifles!" And he ended his long proclamation with an unmistakably Communist finale: "Long live the working class! Long live the farmers! Long live the humble! Long live the socialist revolution! Patria o muerte! We shall overcome!" — The demagogic phrases of a system which promises the worker, the poor, the humble his freedom, and then enchains him."

"Every night for those few minutes before sleep came, I thought about my family and I prayed to God to strengthen my faith and allow me to keep firmly in mind the resolve which I had taken, not to allow myself to be spiritually destroyed. I prayed that my soul would not be hardened and degraded by rancor or hatred. My greatest concern and every moment was not to grow discouraged or desperate; I saw the ravages of depression and desperation on many of those in jail with me. In many conversations with God in the solitude of those few minutes, I penetrated to the foundations of that faith which would be so severely tried in the course of years, but which would finally be victorious."

"Hernández [Director of the prison at La Cabaña] declared that he was opposed to torture and that he felt that no prisoner should be mistreated. But for him, only beatings might be considered a violation of human rights, keeping us completely incommunicado, denying us any mail, visits, books, keeping us naked and underfed, making us sleep on the floor, and effecting psychological tortures on us were not violations."

""You are not political prisoners. You are counterrevolutionaries. In socialist countries there are no political prisoners, that's the first thing you must recognize." [Statement by a Lieutenant from the Political Police]"

"That last the caravan stopped at the entrance of Boniato Prison. When the door opened, I saw a great billboard saying: "CUBA – FIRST FREE TERRITORY IN AMERICA.""

"Cuba was, for most people in the outside world, a kind of earthly paradise, reached by the grace of the revolution. With their distorted news reports on Cuban reality, the world's press backed the tyrant Castro, and the governments of the capitalist nations of Europe, such as Sweden, offered him diplomatic support, trade, and generous free foreign aid."

"This indifference on the part of those who should have been feeling solidarity for our sacrifice made us indignant, depressed, and sad. I tried to be philosophical about the fact that at the moment we could hope for nothing from the indolence and insensitivity of the free world, which allowed indignant voices to be heard only when prisoners were mistreated by rightist dictatorships. I knew it would not be an easy task to create public opinion strong enough to do something concrete for our freedom. I had to trust in Martha and my friends abroad and in God to help. But it was my responsibility, too, to denounce my unjust imprisonment although that would be dangerous; they might even kill me. Still I had to run that risk."

"Pierre Golendorf, a French Marxist intellectual... had come to Cuba and worked for the Cuban government. But Pierre had seen through the falseness of what he called the games of the Revolution and realized that the island was one big farm that Castro ran like a slave plantation."

"Pierre looked very surprised. "I've learned from bitter experience that many things here are not what they seem to be. I thought the Cuban Revolution was the socialist ideal which would return freedom to the people. I came here as in enthusiastic admirer of the revolutionary process. I was willing to give it my best. But I ran up against an implacable bureaucracy with a new power class that eliminated all liberties and that is so unorganized that disorganization becomes a dogma. The country is governed, as though it were a jail, by implacable dictator who runs everything under the revolutionary phraseology with which he has managed to trick everyone, including me.""

"And the government was lying, saying that no other political prisoners were included because those who remained in the prisons were terrorists."

""You know why, Valladares—We have to take drastic measures against you. You keep sending false reports of your treatment out to the foreign press, complaining all the time. We can't allow that, and you won't write anything here. That's why. And you were the one responsible for your situation." [Statement by Major Guido, of the Political Police]"

"He turned red. The lieutenant came to his aid; he spoke softly. "No, Valladares. We haven't created the situation. You have. You've forced us to take preventative measures. And you're lucky to be a prisoner in a Communist jail, where an inmate's physical integrity is respected. If this were a jail in one of the capitalist countries they have killed you already or would beat you.""

"A communist always seems to prefer an angry, blurted, uncontrolled manner. The truth, spoken calmly to his face, always exasperates him."

"秋侵人影瘦，霜染菊花肥。"

"Su Tungp'o said: "Life is like a spring dream which vanishes without a trace." I should be ungrateful to the gods if I did not try to put my life down on record."

"Of a slender figure, she had drooping shoulders and a rather long neck, slim but not to the point of being skinny. Her eyebrows were arched and in her eyes there was a look of quick intelligence and soft refinement."

"Tu's poems," she said, "are known for their workmanship and artistic refinement, while Li's poems are known for their freedom and naturalness of expression. I prefer the vivacity of Li Po to the severity of Tu Fu." "Tu Fu is the acknowledged king of poets," said I, "and he is taken by most people as their model. Why do you prefer Li Po?" "Of course," said she, "as for perfection of form and maturity of thought, Tu is the undisputed master, but Li Po's poems have the wayward charm of a nymph. His lines come naturally like falling flowers and flowing water, and are so much lovelier for their spontaneity. I am not saying that Tu is second to Li; only personally I feel, not that I love Tu less, but that I love Li more." "I say, I didn't know that you are a bosom friend of Li Po!" "I have still in my heart another poet, Po Chüyi, who is my first tutor as it were, and I have not been able to forget him."

""If you are in love with a thing, you will forget its ugliness," said Yün."

"I hope you will find another one who is both beautiful and good to take my place and serve our parents and bring up my children, and then I shall die content."

"I remember that when we began our friendship, our minds were full of noble thoughts and we often thought of living a quiet life in the mountains."

"Yün, I think, is one of the loveliest women in Chinese literature. She is not the most beautiful, for the author, her husband, does not make that claim, and yet who can deny that she is the loveliest?"

"In this simple story of two guileless creatures in their search for beauty, living a life of poverty and privations, decidedly outwitted by life and their cleverer fellowmen, yet determined to snatch every moment of happiness and always fearful of the jealousy of the gods, I seem to see the essence of a Chinese way of life as really lived by two persons who happened to be husband and wife."

"Did Shen Fu, her husband, perhaps idealize her? I hardly think so. The reader will be convinced of this when he reads the story itself. He made no effort to whitewash her or himself. In him, too, lived the spirit of truth and beauty and the genius for resignation and contentment so characteristic of Chinese culture. I cannot help wondering what this commonplace scholar must have been like to inspire such a pure and loyal love in his wife, and to be able to appreciate it so much as to write for us one of the tenderest accounts of wedded love we have ever come across in literature."

"It’s too ugly to speak this story. It sounds like a beggar. How could misfortune follow me so well, and why did I choose it every time?"

"Indian girls can be forgotten so well they forget themselves."

"I left my home because welfare was making me choose between my baby’s formula or oatmeal for myself. The ugly truth is that I lost my son Isadore in court. … The ugly of that truth is that I gave birth to my second son as I was losing my first. My court date and my delivery date aligned. In the hospital, they told me that my first son would go with his father."

"Isaiah cried all night, and I remembered well that I held a hand over his mouth, long enough for me to know I am a horror to my baby."

"My story was maltreated. The words were too wrong and ugly to speak. I tried to tell someone my story, but he thought it was a hustle."

"Sometimes suicidality doesn’t seem dark; it seems fair."

"The book does everything it technically shouldn’t, brushing off the familiar regimen prescribed by MFA programs, and slipping the strictures of commercial publishing. The thrilling part is, it works. Heart Berries is a reminder that, in the right hands, literature can do anything it wants."

"Having always felt deeply impatient and limited by having to express myself in perfect grammar and punctuation (this was pre-apostrophe gate!), I am quietly reveling in the profundity of Mailhot’s deliberate transgression in Heart Berries and its perfect results. I love her suspicion of words. I have always been terrified and in awe of the power of words – but Mailhot does not let them silence her in Heart Berries. She finds the purest way to say what she needs to say."

"Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results."

"The cowards never started and the weak died along the way. That leaves us, ladies and gentlemen. Us."

"The single easiest way to find out how you feel about someone. Say goodbye."

"For nearly a decade I have wanted, with a growing sense of urgency, to write something which would show what the whole War and post-war period—roughly, from the years leading up to 1914 until about 1935—has meant to the men and women of my generation, the generation of those boys and girls who grew up just before the War broke out. I wanted to give too, if I could, an impression of the changes which that period brought about in the minds and lives of very different groups of individuals belonging to the large section of middle-class society from which my own family comes. Only, I felt, by some such attempt to write history in terms of personal life could I rescue something that might be of value, some element of truth and hope and usefulness, from the smashing up of my own youth by the War."

"I have tried to write the exact truth as I saw and see it about both myself and other people, since a book of this kind has no value unless it is honest... It is not by accident that what I have written constitutes, in effect, the indictment of a civilisation."

""Long ago there lived a rich merchant who, besides possessing more treasures than any king in the world, had in his great hall three chairs, one of silver, one of gold, and one of diamonds. But his greatest treasure of ail was his only daughter, who was called Catherine. One day Catherine was sitting in her own room when suddenly the door flew open, and in came a tall and beautiful woman... 'Catherine... which would you rather have a happy youth or a happy old age?... Then Catherine thought... ‘If I say a happy youth, then I shall have to suffer all the rest of my life. No, I will bear trouble now, and have something better to look forward to.’ So she looked up and said : ‘ Give me a happy old age.’...‘ So be it,’ said the lady..."

"When the Great War broke out, it came to me not as a superlative tragedy, but as an interruption of the most exasperating kind to my personal plans. To explain the reason for this egotistical view of history’s greatest disaster, it is necessary to go back a little — to go back, though only for a moment, as far as the decadent ’nineties, in which I opened my eyes upon the none - too promising day. p. 17"

"Like many men who have been brought up without academic contacts, my father was at first more ready to listen to family cronies without any special title to their opinions, than to unfamiliar experts with every qualification for offering advice. The fact that his highly respected old friend regarded the presence of women at Oxford as in no way remarkable undoubtedly caused him to revise his opinion on the whole subject of the higher education of daughters."

"The same khaki-clad civilians do the same uninspiring things as complacently as ever. They are still surprised that anyone should be mad enough to want to go from this comfort to an unknown discomfort—to a place where men are and do not merely play at being soldiers."

"I am writing this in front of an open casement window overlooking the sea. The sky is cloudless, and the russet sails of the fishing smacks flame in the sun. It is summer but it is not war; and I dare not look at it. It only makes me angry with myself for being here — and with the others for being content to be here. When men whom I have once despised as effeminate are being sent back wounded from the front, when nearly everyone I know is either going or has gone, can I think of this with anything but rage and shame?"

"It is harder now the spring days are beginning to come... to keep the thought of war before one’s mind - especially here, where there is always a kind of dreamy spell which makes one feel that nothing poignant and terrible can ever come near. Winter departs so early here... ”"

"Sometimes... I’ve wished I’d never met you — that you hadn’t come to take away my impersonal attitude towards the War and make it a cause of suffering to me as it is to thousands of others. But if I could choose not to have met you, I wouldn’t do it — even though my future had always to be darkened by the shadow of death."

""Would you like me any less if I was, say, minus an arm?..." My reply need not be recorded. It brought the tears so near to the surface again that I picked up the coat which I had thrown off, and abruptly said I would lake it upstairs which I did the more promptly when I suddenly realised that he was nearly crying too."

"It is still difficult to realise that the moment has actually come at last when 1 shall have no peace of mind any more until the War is over. I cannot pretend any longer that I am glad even for your sake, but I suppose I must try to write as calmly as you do—though if it were my own life that were going to be in danger I think I could face the future with more equanimity.”"

"How fortunate we were who still had hope, I did not then realise ; I could not know how soon the time would come when we should have no more hope, and yet be unable to die. Roland’s letters—the sensitive letters of the newly baptised young soldier, so soon to be hardened by the protective iron of remorseless indifference to horror and pain—made the struggle to concentrate no easier, for they drove me to a feverish searching into fundamental questions to which no immediate answers were forthcoming."

"The dug-outs have been nearly all blown in, the wire entanglements are a wreck, and in among the chaos of twisted iron and splintered timber and shapeless earth are the fleshless, blackened bones of simple men who poured out their red, sweet wine of youth unknowing, for nothing more tangible than Honour or their Country’s Glory or another’s Lust of Power..."

"Let him who thinks War is a glorious, golden thing, who loves to roll forth stirring words of exhortation, invoking Honour and Praise and Valour and Love of Country with as thoughtless and fervid a faith as inspired the priests of Baal to call on their own slumbering deity, let him but look at a little pile of sodden grey rags that cover half a skull and a shin-bone and what might have been Its ribs, or at this skeleton lying on its side, resting half crouching as it fell, perfect but that it is headless, and with the tattered clothing still draped round it; and let him realise how grand and glorious a thing it is to have distilled all Youth and Joy and Life into a found heap of hideous putrescence."

"Who is there who has known and seen who can say that Victory is worth the death of even one of these?"

"Those who are old and think this War so terrible do not know what it means to us who are young... When I think how suddenly, instantly, a chance bullet may put an end to that brilliant life, may cut it off in its youth and mighty promise, faith in the ‘increasing purpose’ of the ages grows dim."

"The fight around Hill 60 which was gradually developing, assisted by the unfamiliar horror of gas attacks, into the Second Battle... did nothing to restore my faith in the benevolent intentions of Providence."

"We should never be at the mercy of Providence if only we understood that we ourselves are Providence."

"For a woman as for a man, marriage might enormously help or devastatingly hinder the growth of her power to contribute something impersonally valuable to the community in which she lived, but it was not that power, and could not be regarded as an end in itself. Nor, even, were children ends in themselves; it was useless to go on producing human beings merely in order that they, in their sequence, might produce others, and never turn from this business of continuous procreation to the accomplishment of some definite and lasting piece of work."

"I don't think victory over death... is anything so superficial as a person fulfilling their normal span of life. It can be twofold; a victory over death by the man who faces it for himself without fear, and a victory by those who, loving him, know that death is but a little thing compared with the fact that he lived and was the kind of person he was."

"Finally, an English-speaking woman professor from Cologne University took us militantly in hand, and treated us to a long and bitter dissertation on the blind incredulity of our country during the War. England’s propaganda, she insisted — quite correctly — had had to be far more malevolent than that of France and Germany, the conscription countries, because Englishmen would never have been persuaded to change their habits and join the Army without some exceptionally strong appeal to their sentimental emotions."

"At morning Mass in Cologne Cathedral we stood unobserved beneath the high, pallid windows amid the packed congregation of shabby, heavy-eyed men and women, their sunken faces stoically devoid of emotion as they sang in harmony with the exquisite music which rolled through the vibrating arches above our heads. As I stood in that pale crowd of Germans, all singing, it seemed incredible that the world could have been as it was ten years ago; whatever evil was here, I wondered, that Edward and Roland had died to destroy? What enemy could there have been whose annihilation justified the loss of even one soldier?"

"It was best, after all, that our dead who were so much part of us, yet were debarred from our knowledge of the post-war world and never even realised that we “won,” could not come back and see, upon the scarred face of Europe, the final consequences of their young pursuit of “heroism in the abstract.”"

"How futile it had all been, that superhuman gallantry! It had amounted, in the end, to nothing but a passionate gesture of negation—the negation of all that the centuries had taught themselves through long eons of pain."

"I wonder how we should like being a conquered people...."

"War, especially if one is the winner, is such bad form. There is a strange lack of dignity in conquest; the dull, uncomplaining endurance of defeat appears more worthy of congratulation. Modem war is nothing but a temporary — though how disastrous! forgetfulness by neighbours that they are gentlemen; its only result must be the long reaping in sorrow of that which was sown in pride."

"“One day,” he exclaimed exultantly, “we will make war upon them and treat them as they have treated us l I am longing for that war ! ” And we couldn’t persuade him that we were not Quakers when we said that we thought the world had had enough of destruction and death."

"“Oh, life!” I silently petitioned the future... if I do finally decide to marry G. and have a family — and I’m not absolutely certain, yet, that I really want to do either — please grant that I have only daughters; I’m afraid, in the world as it is, to have a son. Our generation is condemned, condemned, and the League, and all that it stands for, is only a brittle toy in the hands of ruthless, primeval forces!”"

"To rescue mankind from that domination by the irrational which leads to war could surely be a more exultant fight than war itself, a fight capable of enlarging the souls of men and women with the same heightened consciousness of living, and uniting them in one dedicated community whose common purpose transcends the individual. Only the purpose itself would be different, for its achievement would mean, not death, but life."

"To look forward, I concluded, and to have courage—the courage of adventure, of challenge, of initiation, as well as the courage of endurance—that was surely part of fidelity. The lover, the brother, the friends whom I had lost, had' all in their different ways possessed this courage, and it would not be utterly wasted if only, through those who were left, it could influence the generations still to be, and convince them that, so long as the spirit of man remained undefeatable, life was worth having and worth giving."

"80 years ago Vera Brittain wrote Testament of Youth, a moving memoir about her experiences as a young woman during the First World War. Her account detailed the men she had lost (including several friends, her fiancé and brother) and the personal battles she fought as a VAD nurse. Brittain’s immense bravery and biting account of the horrors of war captured the hearts of a generation. To mark the centenary of WWI, Vera’s timeless memoir has been made into a major motion picture (released January 16th)... Testament of Youth should stand as ‘a warning which speaks to our own time as much as it did to the book’s first readers’, a sentiment matching Brittain’s own belief: ‘A personal difficulty overcome, a grief survived, a philosophy evolved out of sorrow – these things…belong to the collective effort of humanity.’"

"In the end the war did spare Vera Brittain, but her fiance, her brother and her two dearest male friends were all dead by the time the armistice was signed in November 1918. The idea for a book, however, survived. It would later become Testament of Youth, one of the most famous memoirs of the 20th century, and this year marks the 80th anniversary of its publication."

"I think what is different about Testament of Youth, what has made it last, is that it does two things simultaneously," says Brittain's biographer and literary executor, Mark Bostridge. "It moves and it educates."

"In the end the war did spare Vera Brittain, but her fiance, her brother and her two dearest male friends were all dead by the time the armistice was signed in November 1918. The idea for a book, however, survived. It would later become Testament of Youth, one of the most famous memoirs of the 20th century, and this year marks the 80th anniversary of its publication... Eighty years on, it remains one of the most moving books ever written about the damage of war and its continuing personal cost."

"Filipinos have built many cities, expressways, subways, railways, and airports elsewhere in the world as OFWs. The pandemic gave us the best talent pool one could ever ask for. Build, Build, Build gave OFWs an opportunity to serve their country if they wanted to. Although we couldn’t match the salaries they received abroad, many stayed to ensure that Filipinos would get to use infrastructure that they only saw in photos before. We are on the right track. The Philippines can be a trillion-dollar economy."

"Many will try to discredit the accomplishments of 6.5 million construction workers. They will say that what we have completed is not enough, that there could have been many things that we could have done still, or that we never really worked at all. Allow me to say — if you are reading this, and you’re part of the Build, Build, Build team - without you, we wouldn’t have been able to build 29,264 kilometers of roads, 5,950 bridges, 11,340 flood control projects, 222 evacuation centers, 150,149 classrooms, 214 airport projects, and 451 seaport projects. Philippines is in a much better place because of your skill, work, and sacrifices."

"About five years ago, on our first day of office — Build, Build, Build Czar Mark Villar and I were talking — “What can we do to make the Philippines a better place?” His answer was simple —roads to the most rural areas so that children can go to school without risking their lives, bridges to connect farmers and fishermen to their markets and infrastructure that would open up opportunities in the countryside and allow Filipinos to dream and aspire for a better future."

"What is Build, Build, Build? It is a revolution of Filipinos who want the next generation to see a better Philippines."

"People would often ask - what is Build, Build, Build? it Is a springboard, a chance to turn a dream of connecting Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao into a reality. It means connecting 81 provinces, 146 cities, and 1,489 municipalities.”"

"This is the first time in Philippine history that expressways operated by different concessionaires — as in this case, San Miguel Corporation and Metro Pacific — will interconnect. And who are the biggest victors of this arrangement? The Filipino people.”"

"Back in 2016, no one knew what Build, Build, Build meant or what it stood for. Critics had very little expectation of the team. They wagered against our success, not knowing that when they did, they gambled against the future of their country. They were certain that the infrastructure projects would never materialize — that blueprints would remain as drawings. They didn’t expect 6.5 million Filipinos to stand and work behind it."

"Before the six-month closure of Boracay, coliform bacteria in Bolabog reached as high as one million most probable number (MPN) per 100 mililiter (ml). The streets were so narrow and cars could not pass through. Pedestrians competed with pedicabs and tricycles for whatever little space was left on the street. There were no sidewalks. Establishments encroached on the shoreline, with some sections left with barely any sand.Six months later, water quality had significantly improved — with a recorded value of only 19 to 20 MPN/100 ml. This is even lower than the acceptable threshold of 100 MPN/100 ml for swimming areas and 200 MPN/100 ml for areas of non- contact sport."

"In one of our visits, I met a fourth-year high school student, who was three months shy from graduation. Before Yolanda hit, he was studying for his exams with his girlfriend. It was supposed to be the last Christmas they would be dependent on their allowances. They dreamed of traveling together after college. It was going to be their first time. They never had money to spare before. But in three months, they thought, everything would be all right. They only had to wait a few more months. After all, they had already waited for four years. What he didn’t expect was the fact that the storm [Typhoon Haiyan] would be so strong he would have to choose between saving his girlfriend and her one-year-old niece. For months, he would stare longingly at the sea, at the exact same spot he found his girlfriend, with a piece of galvanized iron that was used for roofing pierced through her stomach. It was a relief that one of the first projects we started under DPWH Secretary Mark Villar was the Leyte Tide Embankment, a storm surge protection structure that would serve as the first line of defense for residents of Tacloban, Palo, and Tanauan in Leyte should another typhoon hit the region."

"The United Nations has often defined culture as being created, contested, and recreated within the social praxis of diverse groups in economic, social, and political arenas. There is no point to segregation — to further an invisible line dividing Christians and Muslims. Just as men need to stand up for women in gender rights, Catholics must stand with our Muslim brothers and sisters for sustainable peace. We must be the first to oppose whenever Muslims are branded and discriminated against. As the old Chinese proverb say — Just as a fence has to be built with pegs, an able person needs the help of three others."

"If you are in any way part of Build, Build, Build, be strong and steadfast. The truth will not change only because alternate realities are repeated, or that facts are often ignored. The attacks will be more vicious and it will be at a rate that we have never seen before. Do not be disheartened. There is work to be done still. While we are already able to complete 29,264 kilometers of roads, 15,134 kilometers are still ongoing. While we have already built 5,950 bridges, we still have 1,859 bridges to build."

"In the Philippines, there wasn’t much political support or policy or infrastructure that would address the needs of cyclists and pedestrians. It was almost impossible — and to a certain extent unsafe — to walk or cycle alongside national highways. Fortunately, the vision for Philippine infrastructure is fast changing. With the issuance of DPWH Department Order 88, all projects that involve new road and bridge construction will include in their design the provision of bicycle facilities, if feasible."

"Soon, the Philippines will be a cycling country."

"We must come to the table knowing that there is no barangay, city, province, government, or country that can solve the COVID-19 crisis alone. More than ever, human collectivism is key. We have prepared for wars even before they happened. Maybe this time, we ought to work together, collectively and purposively, regardless of race, ethnicity, political affiliation, and religion, in finding a solution to a threat that has shaken our very definition of civilization."

"Love is choosing someone every day, even when you are disenchanted and disappointed, even when the rest of the world offers brief, short-lived, and uncomplicated romances, even when the easier option is to simply let go.” - Anna Mae Yu Lamentillo , Night Owl: A Nationbuilder’s Manual 2nd Edition"

"Cinderella, Snow White, or Red Riding Hood wasn’t our role models. We were taught from a very young age that girls need not be saved, that they could be heroes, protagonists of their own stories. Girls are not inferior to men, not in this generation or the ones before it.”"

"At the onset, critics pointed out that Boracay beach closure seemed to be a drastic move, an isolated strategy. But the statement was nothing but a myth. When I visited Florida as part of the US Department of State’s International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP), I learned that beach closures were part of a standard operating procedure relevant to Algal Bloom Monitoring. Recently, it closed Jupiter Beaches on Palm Beach County, Hobe Sound Beach, and Bathtub Beach in Martin County.In Rhode Island, the moment the concentration of Enterocci bacteria in beach water exceeds 60 colony-forming units per 100 mililiters, they issue a temporary closure. In 2018 alone, there were at least 40 beach closures in Rhode Island. - Anna Mae Yu Lamentillo , Night Owl: A Nationbuilder’s Manual 2nd Edition"

"The cause of this, however, is, that the idea of individual, in the sense in which it occurs in animal nature, cannot in any way be applied to the vegetable world."

"But every plant developed in any higher degree, is an aggregate of fully individualized, independent, separate beings, even the cells themselves."

"Each cell leads a double life: an independent one, pertaining to its own development alone; and another incidental, in so far as it has become an integral part of a plant."

"How does this peculiar little organism, the cell, originate?"

"To enter upon Raspail’s work appears to me incompatible with the dignity of science. (in relation to François Raspail)"

"It is an altogether absolute law, that every cell (setting aside the cambium for the present) must make its first appearance in the form of a very minute vesicle, and gradually expand to the size which it presents in the fully-developed condition"

"The universal and altogether absolute fact at which we first arrive is, that the fibres are never formed free, but are developed in the interior of cells; and that the walls of these cells in the young state are simple, and generally very delicate."

"I now return, after this somewhat lengthy digression, to my subject."

"What is meant by to grow? is a question to which every child quickly replies, “when I am getting as big as father.’ There is truth in this answer, but not sufficient to satisfy science."

"Words have no value in themselves, but are like coin, merely tokens of a value not exhibited in species, in order to facilitate commerce."

"Unfortunately the perplexity of our social relations has caused us to forget entirely the original meaning of money, the sign has become to us the thing itself; may some good genius protect us from similar mistakes in our intellectual life."

"The plant unfolds itself by the expansion and development of the cells already formed. It is this phenomenon especially, one altogether peculiar to plants, which, because it depends upon the fact of their being composed of cells, can never occur in any, not even the most remote form in crystals or animals."

"The origin and signification of cambium is the nut on which so many young phytologists have already broken their milk-teeth, the Gordian knot which so many botanical Alexanders have cut instead of untying, and the enigma, for the solution of which almost all the Coryphæi of our science have laboured with more or less success."

"I have attempted in this Memoir, so far as lay in my power, to solve many interesting questions in Vegetable Physiology, or, by more accurate definitions of the subject, to advance nearer to a future solution. May these observations meet with a friendly reception at the hands of the vegetable physiologists of Germany, and be speedily improved upon and extended."

"The irruption of death into my life has enabled me to express a trifle more concretely my contempt for the false consolation of religion, and belief in the centrality of science and reason."

"Nothing reminds one of impending extinction more than the growth of one’s children, for whom room must be made, and who are in fact one’s only hint of even a tincture of a hope of immortality."

"Death has this much to be said for it: You don’t have to get out of bed for it. Wherever you happen to be They bring it to you – free."

"I of course do not believe that it is Allah who determines these things. (Salman Rushdie, commenting on my book god Is Not Great, remarked rather mordantly that the chief problem with its title was a lack of economy: that it was in other words exactly one word too long.)"

"Everything about Christianity is contained in the pathetic image of “the flock.”"

"“The one unforgivable sin,” she used to say, “is to be boring.”"

"It was indeed Auden – who had been a master at such a school as well as having been a pupil at one – who had said that the experience had given him an instinctive understanding of what it would be like to live under fascism. (He had also said, when told by the headmaster that only “the cream” attended the school: “yes I know what you mean – thick and rich.”)"

"The conventional word that is employed to describe tyranny is “systematic.” The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure if they have followed the rules correctly or not. (The only rule of thumb was: whatever is not compulsory is forbidden.) Thus, the ruled can always be found to be in the wrong."

"But a protestation of my innocence would have been, as in any inquisition, an additional proof of guilt."

"Of course I now recognize this as the working model, drawn from monotheistic religion, where love is compulsory and must be offered to a higher being one must necessarily also fear. This moral blackmail is based on a quintessential servility. The fact that the headmaster held the prayerbook and the Bible during the services also drove home to me the obvious fact that religion is an excellent reinforcement of shaky temporal authority."

"I always take it for granted that sexual moralizing by public figures is a sign of hypocrisy or worse, and most usually a desire to perform the very act that is most being condemned."

"I understand in retrospect that this was my first introduction to a conflict that dominates all our lives: the endless, irreconcilable conflict between the values of Athens and Jerusalem. On the one hand, very approximately, is the world not of hedonism but of tolerance of the recognition that sex and love have their ironic and perverse dimensions. On the other is the stone-faced demand for continence, sacrifice, and conformity, and the devising of ever-crueler punishments for deviance, all invoked as if this very fanaticism did not give its whole game away. Repression is the problem in the first place."

"After all, to be a mere “Sixties” person, all you needed was to have been born in the right year, and to be available for what I once heard called “the most contemptible solidarity of all: the generational.”"

"If you have never yourself had the experience of feeling that you are yoked to the great steam engine of history, then allow me to inform you that the conviction is a very intoxicating one."

"The occasion was to become a famous one, since it was the very time when the habitual and professional liar Clinton later claimed that he “didn’t inhale.” There’s no mystery about this, any more than there ever was about his later falsifications. He has always been allergic to smoke and he preferred, like many another marijuana enthusiast, to take his dope in the form of large handfuls of cookies and brownies."

"Even as I tried to convince myself, I realized what I have often had to accept since, that if you have to try and persuade yourself of something, you are probably already very much inclined to doubt or distrust it."

"Once you have been told that you can’t leave a place, its attractions may be many but its charm will instantly be void."

"So there it was: Cuban Socialism was too much like a boarding school in one way and too much like a church in another."

"One of the claims of the Cuban revolution was to have abolished prostitution and though I had never personally believe this to be feasible (the withering away of the state being one thing but the withering away of the penis quite another), the whore scene in Santa Clara was many times more lurid than anything to be imagined in a “bourgeois” society."

"I made the mere observation that if the most salient figure in the state and society was immune from critical comment, then all the rest was detail. Oh, please never forget how useful the obvious can be. And how right it is that the image of the undraped emperor is such a keystone of our folklore."

"As 1968 began to ebb into 1969, however, and as “anticlimax” began to become a real word in my lexicon, another term began to obtrude itself. People began to intone the words “The Personal Is Political.” At the instant I first heard this deadly expression, I knew as one does from the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it was – cliché is arguably forgiven here – very bad news. From now on, it would be enough to be a member of a sex or gender, or epidermal subdivision, or even erotic “preference,” to qualify as a revolutionary. In order to begin a speech or ask a question from the floor, all that would be necessary by way of preface would be the words: “Speaking as a…” Then could follow any self-loving description. I will have to say this much for the old “hard” Left: we earned our claim to speak and intervene by right of experience and sacrifice and work. It would never have done for any of us to stand up and say that our sex or sexuality or pigmentation or disability were qualifications in themselves. There are many ways of dating the moment when The Left lost or – I would prefer to say – discarded its moral advantage, but this was the first time that I was to see the sellout conducted so cheaply."

"While at Berkeley he had been handed a pamphlet that spoke of the contents of the university’s library system as so much “useless white knowledge”: this had somewhat put him off the New Left in its then-Bay Area form, where I assure you it can still be met with."

"I made a minor discovery which has been useful to me since in the analysis of some larger public figures like my contemporary Bill Clinton: if you can give a decent speech in public or cut any kind of figure on the podium, then you need to never dine and or sleep alone."

"But the Seventies were only the Seventies because they had to have a name. Nullity and anticlimax appeared to close in on all sides. And so did certain kinds of nastiness, often composed of, or distilled from, the worst of the Sixties."

"In the squalid and cramped back streets around the Belfast shipyards, it seemed to us, no better illustration could be found of the need for working people to forget their confessional and national differences and unite in a brotherly fashion. But to say that such appeals failed to achieve locomotive force among the masses would be to understate the case to an almost heroic degree."

"I eventually came to appreciate a feature of the situation that has since helped me to understand similar obduracy in Lebanon, Gaza, Cyprus, and several other spots. The local leaderships that are generated by the “troubles” in such places do not want there to be a solution. A solution would mean that they were no longer deferred to by visiting UN or American mediators, no longer invited to ritzy high-profile international conferences, no longer treated with deference by the mass media, and no longer able to make a second living by smuggling and protection-racketeering. The power of this parasitic class was what protracted the fighting in Northern Ireland for years and years after it became obvious to all that nobody (except the racketeers) could “win.” And when it was over, far too many of the racketeers became profiteers of the “peace process” as well. No, what got people going in Belfast in the early 1970s was not humanism and solidarity but rather violence, cruelty, conspiracy, bigotry, alcohol, and organized crime."

"So far from being some jaded Casanova, Martin possesses the rare gift – enviable if potentially time consuming – of being able to find something attractive in almost any woman. If this be misogyny, then give us increase of it."

"Of the numerous regrettable elements that go to make up the unlawful carnal-knowledge industry, I should single out for distinction the look of undisguised contempt that is often worn on the faces of its female staff."

"Even at the time, as I left the party, I knew I had met someone rather impressive. And the worst of “Thatcherism,” as I was beginning by degrees to discover, was the rodent slowly stirring in my viscera: the uneasy but unbanishable feeling that on some essential matters she might be right."

"Today I want to puke when I hear the word “radical” applied so slothfully and stupidly to Islamist murderers; the most plainly reactionary people in the world."

"“Sometimes the wrong people can have the right line.” I thought then that he had said more than he intended, and myself experienced the remark as a sort of emancipation from the worry, which did still occasionally nag at me, that by taking up some out-of-line position I would find myself “in bed with,” as the saying went, unsavory elements. It’s good to throw off this sort of moral blackmail and mind-forged manacle as early in life as one can."

"The real struggle for us is for the citizen to cease to be the property of the state."

"It didn’t work so well in Salt Lake City, say, where Balliol men and Trotskyists alike were as rare as rocking-horse droppings and one had a little choice but to take the tour of the Mormon Tabernacle and notice the John Birch Society bookshop that was right next door to it. Beautiful as Salt Lake City was, with its street plan leading to white-topped horizons in every direction, and lovely as Utah was, with its main church having only just had the needful “revelation” that black people might have human souls after all, it was a slight relief to cross the frontier of Nevada and breathe the bracingly sordid and amoral air of Reno and Las Vegas."

"The best of that scene was probably over, because by the time you have heard of such a “scene” it has almost invariably moved on or decayed."

"Haight-Ashbury and the flower-power district were getting truly tawdry but this was also in obedience to the iron law which states that once you have to call something a “historic district” or a “popular quarter” then, just like the Wild West, it loses whatever character gave it the definition in the first place."

"I was thunderstruck, if only by trying to picture this happening in a British cinema. (Of course it would be tough to imagine it happening in a New York or Cleveland one, either, but a crucial part of seeing America was also seeing how many Americas there were.)"

"I went to see the Black Panthers, whose “breakfast program” for poor ghetto kids had degenerated into a shakedown of local merchants and whose newspaper now featured paeans to North Korea."

"An old joke has an Oxford professor meeting an American former graduate student and asking him what he’s working on these days. “My thesis is on the survival of the class system in the United States.” “Oh really, that’s interesting: one didn’t think there was a class system in the United States.” “Nobody does. That’s how it survives.”"

"I remember a female editor saying to me over a generous cocktail: “Of course the difference between us and you Brits is that you have irony and we don’t.” I decided to smile and murmur, “Well, apparently not,” and she looked at me as if a trick cigar had just exploded in her face."

"When Nixon finally went down, I celebrated as if I’d defeated a personal enemy. In the aftermath of that very thing, though, I had to reflect a bit. After all, the American legal system and the U.S. Constitution had survived Nixon’s attempt to undo it. Congress had held wide-open hearings, of a kind it was very hard to imagine taking place in the Palace of Westminster, and summoned important witnesses to testify. The Justice Department had resisted the president’s lawless attempts to purge it. The special-prosecutor system had proved itself. The American press, led by the Washington Post, had penetrated the veil of lies and bribery and – despite crude threats from the White House – had eventually named the main perpetrators on the front page."

"He might have done the right thing on that occasion, but I did not at all like Ronald Reagan and nobody then could persuade me that I should. Even now, when I squint back at him through the more roseate lens of his historic compromise with Gorbachev, I can easily remember (which is precisely why one’s memoirs must always strive to avoid too much retrospective lens adjustment) exactly why I found him so rebarbative at the time. There was, first, his appallingly facile manner as a liar. He could fix the camera with a folksy smirk that I always found annoying but that got him called “The Great Communicator” by a chorus of toadies in the press, and proceed to utter the most resounding untruths."

"I found a row house in northeast Capitol Hill, where if I wanted to cab it home late at night from Dupont Circle, African-born taxi drivers would sometimes decline to take me (on the unarguable – at least by me with them – grounds that it was “a black area”). I have never since been able to use the word “gentrification” as a sneer: the unavoidable truth is that it’s almost invariably a good symptom."

"I did not intend to be told, I said, that the people of the United States – who included all those toiling in the Pentagon as well as all those, citizens and non-citizens, who had been immolated in Manhattan – had in any sense deserved this or brought it upon themselves. I also tried to give a name to the mirthless, medieval, death-obsessed barbarism that had so brazenly unmasked itself. It was, I said, “Fascism with an Islamic Face.”"

"As time had elapsed, I had gradually been made aware that there was a deep division between Noam and myself. Highly critical as we both were of American foreign policy, the difference came down to this. Regarding almost everything since Columbus as having been one continuous succession of genocides and land-thefts, he did not really believe that the United States of America was a good idea to begin with. Whereas I had slowly come to appreciate that it most certainly was, and was beginning to feel less and less shy about saying so. We commenced a duel, conducted largely in cyberspace, in which I began by pointing out the difference between unmanned cruise missiles on the one hand and crowded civilian airliners rammed into heavily populated buildings on the other. We more or less went on from there."

"I saw the awakening of a new respect for the almost-eclipsed figure of the American proletarian, who was busting his sinews in the rubble and carnage of downtown while the more refined elements wrung their hands. What an opportunity for the Left to miss, there, and what an overbred and gutless Left it had proved to be."

"Amid all this chaos on the various frontiers what I increasingly thought was: thank whatever powers there may be for the power of the United States of America. Without that reserve strength, the sheer mass of its arsenal in combination with the innovative maneuvers of its special forces, the tyrants and riffraff of the world would possess an undeserved sense of impunity. As it was, the Taliban were soon in full flight from the celebrating people they had for so long oppressed, and Al Quaeda was being taught to take heavy casualties as well as inflict them. I was not against this."

"At a time when smallpox vaccination was being denounced by leading men of god like Dr. Timothy Dwight of Yale as an interference with god’s design, Jefferson helped devise a method of keeping Jenner’s life-saving physic cool for conveyance over long distances, taught Lewis and Clark to administer it during their long trek across the interior, and saw to it that all his slaves were inoculated against the scourge."

"In the larger world, I knew well enough, there was a challenge from Islamic extremism. It had, for example, destroyed the promise of the great Iranian revolution that pitted masses of unarmed civilians against an oil-crazed megalomaniac with a pitiless network of secret police and a huge, purchased army which in the end was too mercenary and corrupt to fight for him. At the moment when Iran stood at the threshold of modernity, a black-winged ghoul came flapping back from exile on a French jet and imposed a version of his own dark and heavy uniform on a people too long used to being bullied and ordered around. For the female population of the country, at least, the new bondage was heavier than the old."

"When the Washington Post telephoned me at home on Valentine’s Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwah, I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression. Plus, of course, friendship – though I like to think that my reaction would have been the same if I hadn’t known Salman at all. To re-state the premise of the argument again: the theocratic head of a foreign despotism offers money in his own name in order to suborn the murder of a civilian citizen of another country, for the offense of writing a work of fiction. No more root-and-branch challenge to the values of the Enlightenment (on the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille) or to the First Amendment to the Constitution, could be imagined. President George H.W. Bush, when asked to comment, could only say grudgingly that, as far as he could see, no American interests were involved… To the contrary, said Susan Sontag, Americans had a general interest in defending free expression from barbarism, and also in defending free citizens from state-supported threats of murder accompanied by sordid offers of bounty."

"This sort of stuff was at least partly to be expected. Rushdie was a bit of a Leftie; he had contrived to disturb the status quo: he could and should expect conservative disapproval. More worrying to me were those on the Left who took almost exactly the same tone. Germaine Greer, always reliably terrible about such matters, again came to the fore, noisily defending the rights of book burners. “The Rushdie affair,” wrote the Marxist critic John Berger within a few days of the fatwah, has already cost several human lives and threatens to cost many, many more.” And “the Rushdie affair,” wrote Professor Michael Dummett of All Souls, has done untold damage. It has intensified the alienation of Muslims here…Racist hostility towards them has been inflamed.” Here we saw the introduction – and by a former promoter of “Michael X,” do not forget – of a willful, crass confusion between religious faith, which is voluntary, and ethnicity, which is not. All the deaths and injuries – all of them – from the mob scenes in Pakistan to the activities of the Iranian assassination squads, were directly caused by Rushdie’s enemies. None of the deaths or injuries – none of them – were caused by him, or by his friends or defenders. Yet you will notice the displacement tactic used by Berger and Dummett and the multi-culti Left, which blamed the mayhem on an abstract construct –“the Rushdie affair.” I dimly understood at the time that this kind of postmodern Left, somehow in league with political Islam, was something new, if not exactly new Left. That this trahison would take a partly “multicultural” form was also something that was slowly ceasing to surprise me."

"The centers of several British cities were choked by hysterical crowds, all demanding not just less freedom for the collective (they wanted more censorship and more restriction and the extension of an archaic blasphemy law, and more police power over publication) but also screaming for a deeply reactionary attack on the rights of the individual – the destruction of an author’s work and even the taking of an author’s life. That this ultrareactionary mobocracy was composed mainly of people with brown skins ought to have made no difference. In Pakistan, long familiar with the hysteria of the Jamaat Islami and other religio-dictatorial gangs, it would have made no difference at all. But somehow, when staged in the streets and squares of Britain, it did make a difference. A pronounced awkwardness was introduced into the atmosphere: a hinting undercurrent of menace and implied moral and racial blackmail that has never since been dispelled. It took me a long time to separate and classify the three now-distinctive elements of the new and grievance-privileged Islamist mentality, which were self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred."

"It’s still quite something to be told, by the armed, hoarse enforcers of a murder-based regime, that you are yourself “a deadman on leave.” And the claustrophobic world in which he had to live for some years was a prefiguration of the world in which we all, to a greater or lesser extent, live now. I mean to say a world in which a fanatical religion, which makes absolutist claims for itself and promises to supply – even to be – a total solution to all problems – furthermore regards itself is so pure as to be above criticism."

"Since I speak and write about this a good deal, I am often asked at public meetings, in what sometimes seems to me a rather prurient way, whether I myself or my family have “ever been threatened” by jihadists. My answer is that yes, I have, and so has everyone else in the audience, if they have paid enough attention to the relevant bin-Ladenist broadcasts to notice the fact."

"The very multiculturalism and multiethnicity that brought Salman to the West, and that also made us richer by Hanif Kureishi, Nadeem Aslam, Vikram Seth, Monica Ali, and many others, is now one of the disguises for a uniculturalism, based on moral relativism and moral blackmail (in addition to some more obvious blackmail of the less moral sort) whereby the Enlightenment has been redefined as “white” and “oppressive,” mass illegal immigration threatens to spoil everything for everybody, and the figure of the free-floating transnational migrant has been deposed by the contorted face of the psychopathically religious international nihilist, praying for the day when his messianic demands will coincide with possession of an apocalyptic weapon. (These people are not called nihilists for nothing.) Of all of this we were warned, and Salman was the messenger. Mutato nomine et de te fabula narrator: Change only the name and this story is about you."

"The implied accusation – of a U-turn or even of a turned coat – bothered me not at all. I had long since learned to ask John Maynard Keynes’s question: “When the facts change then my opinion changes: and you, sir?”"

"It was, in fact, only after the ghastly war with Iran was over that the truly horrific work in Iraqi Kurdistan had begun. Employing a Koranic verse – the one concerning the so-called Anfal, or “spoils,” specifying what may be exacted from a defeated foe – the Iraqi army and police destroyed more than 4,000 centers of population and killed at least 180,000 Kurds."

"All those who have had similar or comparable experiences will recognize the problem at once: it is not possible for long to be just a little bit heretical."

"So, whenever the subject of Iraq came up, as it did keep on doing through the Clinton years, I had no excuse for not knowing the following things: I knew that its one-party, one-leader state machine was modeled on the precedents of both National Socialism and Stalinism, to say nothing of Al Capone. I knew that its police force was searching for psychopathic killers and sadistic serial murderers, not in order to arrest them but to employ them. I knew that its vast patrimony of oil wealth, far from being “nationalized,” had been privatized for the use of one family, and was being squandered on hideous ostentation at home and militarism abroad."

"One of the manifestations of his megalomania was an ever-increasing piety. He had himself photographed, and painted on huge murals, in the robes of a mullah. He ordered that the jihadi slogan Allahuh Akbar (“God Is Great”) be added to the national flag of Iraq. He began an immense mosque-building program, including the largest mosque in the Middle East, named for “the Mother of All Battles.” He had a whole Koran written in his own blood. This macabre totem was to have been the centerpiece of that mosque. His party and state rhetoric became increasingly frenzied and jihadist in tone, and he stopped supporting secular forces among the Palestinians and instead began financing theocratic ones, such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. An Iraqi bounty was officially and openly paid to the family of any Palestinian suicide bomber. Yet none of this – none of it, including the naming of the slaughterhouse-campaign against the Kurds after a sura of the Koran – would unconvince the utterly smug western “experts” who kept on insisting that his Caligula regime was a “secular” one. To the contrary, it was precisely the genuine secular forces in the country – the Kurds, the Communist and Socialist movements, and the independent trade unions – that Ba’athism had set out deliberately to destroy. And it then filled the resulting vacuum with toxic religious propaganda of the crudest kind. Anyone who heard an Iraqi radio or television broadcast in the last decade of the regime can readily confirm that the insistent themes were those of “martyrdom” and holy war."

"I had become too accustomed to the pseudo-Left new style, whereby if your opponent thought he had identified your lowest possible motive, he was quite certain that he had isolated the only real one. This vulgar method, which is now the norm and the standard in much non-Left journalism as well, is designed to have the effect of making any noisy moron into a master analyst."

"There must be some connection between the general nullity of Christie’s prose and the tendency of her detectives to take Jewishness as a symptom of crime."

"About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. Very often, when I give my view that there is no supernatural dimension, and certainly not one that is only or especially available to the faithful, and that the natural world is wonderful enough – and even miraculous enough if you insist – I attract pitying looks and anxious questions. How, in that case, I am asked, do I find meaning and purpose in life? How does a mere and gross materialist, with no expectation of a life to come, decide what, if anything, is worth caring about? Depending on my mood, I sometimes but not always refrain from pointing out what a breathtakingly insulting and patronizing question this is. (It is on a par with the equally subtle inquiry: Since you don’t believe in our god, what stops you from stealing and lying and raping and killing to your heart’s content?) Just as the answer to the latter question is: self-respect and the desire for the respect of others – while in the meantime it is precisely those who think they have divine permission who are truly capable of any atrocity – so the answer to the first question falls into two parts. A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called “meaningless” except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one’s everyday life as if this were so. Whereas if one sought to define meaninglessness and futility, the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentities…but there, there. Enough."

"The clear awareness of having been born into a losing struggle need not lead one into despair. I do not especially like the idea that one day I shall be tapped on the shoulder and informed, not that the party is over but that it is most assuredly going on – only henceforth in my absence. (It’s the second of those thoughts: the edition of the newspaper that will come out on the day after I have gone, that is the more distressing.) Much more horrible, though, would be the announcement that the party was continuing forever, and that I was forbidden to leave. Whether it was a hellishly bad party or a party that was perfectly heavenly in every respect, the moment that it became eternal and compulsory would be the precise moment that it began to pall."

"Attempts to locate oneself within history are as natural, and as absurd, as attempts to locate oneself within astronomy."

"I suppose that one reason I have always detested religion is its sly tendency to insinuate the idea that the universe is designed with “you” in mind or, even worse, that there is a divine plan into which one fits whether one knows it or not. This kind of modesty is too arrogant for me."

"Who are your favorite heroines in real life? The women of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran who risk their lives and their beauty to defy the foulness of theocracy. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Azar Nafisi as their ideal feminine model."

"What do you most value in your friends? Their continued existence."

"What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition."

"I try to deny myself any illusions or delusions, and I think that this perhaps entitles me to try and deny the same to others, at least as long as they refuse to keep their fantasies to themselves."

"Publicity means that actions are judged by reputations and not the other way about: I never wonder how it happens that mythical figures in religious history come to have fantastic rumors credited to their names."

"But people still do not like to admit is that there were two crimes in the form of one. Just as the destruction of Jewry was the necessary condition for the rise and expansion of Nazism, so the ethnic cleansing of Germans was a precondition for the Stalinization of Poland."

"It is exactly the fear of revenge that motivates the deepest crimes, from the killing of the enemy’s children less they grow up to play their own part, to the erasure of the enemy’s graveyards and holy places so that his hated name can be forgotten."

"But real history is more pitiless even than you had been told it was."

"After the Shoah or Endlösung or Holocaust, many rabbis tried to tell the survivors that the immolation had been a punishment for “exile,” or for insufficient attention to the Covenant. This explanation was something of a flop with those whose parents or children had been the raw material for the “proof,” so for a time the professional interpreters of god’s will went decently quiet. This interval of ambivalence lasted until the war of 1967, when it was announced that the divine purpose could be discerned after all. How wrong, how foolish, to have announced its discovery prematurely! The exile and the Shoah could now both be understood, as part of a heavenly if somewhat roundabout scheme to recover the Western Wall in Jerusalem and other pieces of biblically mandated real estate. I regard it as a matter of self-respect to spit in public on rationalizations of this kind."

"I think I have a very good idea why it is that anti-Semitism is so tenacious and so protean and so enduring. Christianity and Islam, theistic though they may claim to be, are both based on the fetishizing of human primates: Jesus in one case and Mohammed in the other. Neither of these figures can be called exactly historical but both have one thing in common even in their quasi-mythical dimension. Both of them were first encountered by the Jews. And the Jews, ravenous as they were for any sign of the long-sought Messiah, were not taken in by either of these two pretenders, or not in large numbers or not for long. If you meet a devout Christian or a believing Muslim, you are meeting someone who would give everything he owned for a personal, face-to-face meeting with the blessed founder or prophet. But in the visage of the Jew, such ardent believers encounter the very figure who did have such a precious moment, and who spurned the opportunity and turned shrugging aside. Do you imagine for a microsecond that such a vile, churlish transgression will ever be forgiven? I myself certainly hope that it will not. The Jews have seen through Jesus and Mohammed. In retrospect, many of them have also seen through the mythical, primitive, and cruel figures of Abraham and Moses. Nearer to our own time, in the bitter combats over the work of Marx and Freud and Einstein, Jewish participants and protagonists have not been the least noticeable. May this always be the case, whenever any human primate sets up, or is set up by others, as a Messiah."

"I have learned to distrust Utopias and to prefers satires."

"Jerusalem: that pest-house in whose environs all zealots hope that an even greater and final war can be provoked."

"Edward genially enough did not disagree with what I said, but he didn’t seem to admit my point, either. I wanted to press him harder so I veered close enough to the ad hominem to point out that his life – the life of the mind, the life of the book collector and music lover and indeed of the gallery-goer, appreciator of the feminine and occasional boulevardier – would become simply unlivable and unthinkable in an Islamic republic."

"I believe that one or two charges simply must retain their face value and not become debauched or devalued. “Racist” is one such. It is an accusation that must either be made good upon, or fully retracted."

"On me it had the effect of reinforcing the growing opinion that all such images were strictly man-made, and indeed mainly designed like much of religion for the ignoble purpose of scaring children."

"The chapter is called “A Comfortable Stop on the Road to Damascus”. The biblical cliché may seem inescapable but it actually retards understanding.…The whole point of the Damascus legend is that it refuses the very idea of the mind’s evolution, replacing it with the deranged substitute of instant divine revelation. We are forcibly made familiar, usually from febrile tenth-hand accounts of religious visionaries and other probable epileptics and schizophrenics, of those blinding and indeed Damascene moments (or moments of un-blindness as when scales supposedly fall from the eyes) that constitute such revelation. Yet one suspects, as with Archimedes and his eureka, that Pasteur was right and that in the case of sound minds at any rate, great apparent coincidences only occur to the intellect that has rehearsed and prepared for them."

"I always mentally cross my fingers and keep a slight mental reservation whenever “left” and “right” crimes are too glibly associated in the same breath. Yet now, it is those on the Left who have come to offend and irritate me the most, and it is also their crimes and blunders that I feel myself more qualified, as well as more motivated, to point out."

"I sometimes feel that I should carry around some sort of rectal thermometer, with which to test the rate at which I am becoming an old fart."

"Watching the Stalinist world succumb so pathetically, even gratefully, to its death wish in late 1989, when I happily witnessed the terminal twitches and spasms of the Hungarian and Romanian regimes, I had briefly celebrated the end of the totalitarian idea. In Hungary this had already died years previously, at least as Communism, and in Romania it had long before mutated into something grotesque and monstrous: Caligula sculpted in concrete. Milošević, too, exemplified this fusion of the cardboard-suited party-line populist and the hysterical nationalist demagogue."

"Hannah Arendt remarks somewhere that the great achievement of Stalinism was to have deposed the habit of argument and dispute among intellectuals, and to have replaced it with the inquisitorial, unanswerable question of motive."

"The usual duty of the “intellectual” is to argue for complexity and to insist that phenomena in the world of ideas should not be sloganized or reduced to easily repeated formulae. But there is another responsibility, to say that some things are simple and ought not to be obfuscated, and by 1982 Communism had long passed the point where it needed anything more than the old equation of history with the garbage can."

"But whether her mind changed her, or she changed her mind, she manifested the older truth that all riveters of the mind-forged manacles most fear, and that I here repeat: One cannot be just a little bit heretical."

"It became evident that the only historical revolution with any verve left in it, or any example to offer others, was the American one."

"I suspect that the hardest thing for the idealist to surrender is the teleological, or the sense that there is some feasible, lovelier future that can be brought nearer by exertions in the present, and for which “sacrifices” are justified. With some part of my self, I still “feel,” but no longer really think, that humanity would be the poorer without this fantastically potent illusion. “A map of the world that did not show Utopia,” said Oscar Wilde, “would not be worth consulting.” I used to adore that phrase, but now reflect more upon the shipwrecks and prison islands to which the quest has led."

"I have actually seen more prisons broken open, more people and territory “liberated,” and more taboos broken and censors floated, since I let go of the idea, or at any rate the plan, of a radiant future. Those “simple” ordinary propositions, of the open society, especially when contrasted with the lethal simplifications of that society’s sworn enemies, were all I required. This wasn’t a dreary shuffle to the Right, either. It used to be that the Right made tactical excuses for friendly dictatorships, whereas now most conservatives are frantic to avoid even the appearance of doing so, and at least some on the Left can take at least some of the credit for at least some of that."

"It is not so much that there are ironies of history, it is that history itself is ironic. It is not that there are no certainties, it is that it is an absolute certainty that there are no certainties. It is not only true that the test of knowledge is an acute and cultivated awareness of how little one knows (as Socrates knew so well), it is true that the unbounded areas and fields of one’s ignorance are now expanding in such a way, and at such a velocity, as to make the contemplation of them almost fantastically beautiful."

"Over the course of the last decade, I have become vividly aware of a literally lethal challenge from the sort of people who deal in absolute certainty and believe themselves to be actuated and justified by a supreme authority. To have spent so long learning so relatively little, and then to be menaced in every aspect of my life by people who already know everything, and who have all the information they need…More depressing still, to see that in the face of this vicious assault so many of the best lack all conviction, hesitating to defend the society that makes their existence possible, while the worst are full to the brim and boiling over with murderous exaltation."

"The defense of science and reason is the great imperative of our time."

"I don't do it for the money. I've got enough, much more than I'll ever need. I do it to do it. Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That's how I get my kicks."

"I try to learn from the past, but I plan for the future by focusing exclusively on the present."

"Sometimes it pays to be a little wild."

"Experience taught me a few things. One is to listen to your gut, no matter how good something sounds on paper. The second is that you're generally better off sticking with what you know. And the third is that sometimes your best investments are the ones you don't make."

"My philosophy is always to hire the best from the best."

"Deal-making is an ability you're born with. It's in the genes."

"I like thinking big. I always have. To me it's very simple: if you're going to be thinking anyway, you might as well think big. Most people think small, because most people are afraid of success, afraid of making decisions, afraid of winning. And that gives people like me a great advantage."

"I wasn't satisfied just to earn a good living. I was looking to make a statement."

"People think I'm a gambler. I've never gambled in my life. To me, a gambler is someone who plays slot machines. I prefer to own slot machines. It's a very good business being the house."

"The point is that you can't be too greedy."

"I'm a great believer in asking everyone for an opinion before I make a decision. ... I ask and I ask and I ask, until I begin to get a gut feeling about something. And that's when I make a decision. I have learned much more from conducting my own random surveys than I could ever have learned from the greatest of consulting firms."

"The worst thing you can possibly do in a deal is seem desperate to make it. That makes the other guy smell blood, and then you're dead. The best thing you can do is deal from strength, and leverage is the biggest strength you can have. Leverage is having something the other guy wants. Or better yet, needs. Or best of all, simply can't do without. Unfortunately, that isn't always the case, which is why leverage often requires imagination, and salesmanship."

"The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people's fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That's why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It's an innocent form of exaggeration—and a very effective form of promotion."

"My experience is that if you're fighting for something you believe in—even if it means alienating some people along the way—things usually work out for the best in the end."

"One of the problems when you become successful is that jealousy and envy inevitably follow. There are people—I categorize them as life's losers—who get their sense of accomplishment and achievement from trying to stop others. As far as I'm concerned, if they had any real ability they wouldn't be fighting me, they'd be doing something constructive themselves."

"You can't con people, at least not for long. You can create excitement, you can do wonderful promotion and get all kinds of press, and you can throw in a little hyperbole. But if you don't deliver the goods, people will eventually catch on."

"Money was never a big motivation for me, except as a way to keep score. The real excitement is playing the game."

"Get in, get it done, get it done right, and get out."

"The most important thing in life is to love what you're doing, because that's the only way you'll ever be really good at it."

"You can't be scared. You do your thing, you hold your ground, you stand up tall, and whatever happens, happens."

"My own mother was a housewife all her life. And yet it's turned out that I've hired a lot of women for top jobs, and they've been among my best people. Often, in fact, they are far more effective than the men around them."

"In the end, you're measured not by how much you undertake but by what you finally accomplish."

"What I admire most are people who put themselves directly on the line."

"In my life, there are two things I've found I'm very good at: overcoming obstacles and motivating good people to do their best work."

"This boastful, boyishly disarming, thoroughly engaging personal history offers an inside look at aspects of financing, development and construction in big-time New York real estate."