""Het botsen der gevoelens," zegt men vaak, "Kan voeren tot het ware van de zaak". Maar waar vooroordeel met vooroordeel strijdt, Wat is het — dan verlies van tijd!"

"The entire morality of the world could be summarized in the words, do as others do."

"Since I have the obligation to take care of the needs of my family, I have decided to use a talent which, I believe, has been given to me. I am a poet… Phew! You know, reader, what I and all sensible people think about that."

"Maybe nothing is completely true, and not even that."

"One must live with all, e'en if life be hell: Crime makes shame, not monetary stricture"

"I would like to meet myself sometime to see how I would look to myself. But I'd have to be in an extremely good state of mind on such a day, because I don't like unpleasantness."

"I'm afraid love is just a word."

"It was time, he thought, that tore everything to shreds."

"Obama is neither a socialist, nor a mere political accountant. He has some modest ideals, and may yet be an excellent president. But what is needed to revive liberal idealism is a set of new ideas on how to promote justice, equality and freedom in the world. Reagan, Thatcher, and Gorbachev, assisted in the end of an ideology, which once offered hope, and inspired real progress, but resulted in slavery and mass murder. We are still waiting for a new vision, which will lead to progress, but this time, we hope, without tyranny."

"It was, as we know, not so much eradicated as replaced by a Communist orthodoxy after 1949. And when this orthodoxy began to lose its grip on the Chinese public after the death of Chairman Mao in 1976, Chinese officials struggled to find a new set of beliefs to justify their monopoly on power. The ideological hybrid that followed Maoism was "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics," a mixture of state capitalism with political authoritarianism."

"The question, then, for Western companies, as much as for Western governments, is to decide whose side they are on: the Chinese officials who like to define their culture in a paternalistic, authoritarian way, or the large number of Chinese who have their own ideas about freedom."

"But, in the late twentieth century, it became more important to many leftists to save “Third World” culture, no matter how barbaric, from “neo-colonialism,” than to support equality and democracy. People on the left would defend brutal dictators (Castro, Mao, Pol Pot, Khomeini, et al.) simply because they opposed “Western imperialism.” As a result, all politics that were derived, no matter how loosely, from Marxism, lost credibility, and finally died in 1989. This was naturally a disaster for communists and socialists, but also for social democrats, for they had lost an ideological basis for their idealism. And, without idealism, politics becomes a form of accounting, a management of purely material interests."

"Every period in history has its own punishments, and ours has a multitude."

"Memory is like a dog that lies down where it pleases. (Page 1)"

"It is a peculiarity of time that in retrospect it appears so compact, an indivisible solid object, a dish with only one smell and one flavor. (Page 4)"

"From the number of self-murderers he had known-you had to put it that way, for the fact that someone died rounded off your knowledge of that person, if only because he or she could no longer present you with surprises-he was able to conclude that his circle of acquaintance must consist of a thousand people. If he were to invite all these voluntary dead to tea, two boxes of cream cakes from Berkhof's would scarcely suffice. (Page 20)"

"It would be like this when you were really old-a city full of imaginary houses and women, rooms and girls. (Page 125)"

"I had breezed home on the wings of five gins."

"My tears are only triggered by kitsch."

"We will feel the draft blowing through the cracks in the structure of causality."

"That is the difference between gods and men. Gods can change themselves; humans can only be changed."

"Besides, I simply had to get back to my books right away, because the company of most people, once the predictable events have taken their course, does not inspire conversation on my part."

"For the sake of having her with me I had to tolerate the shadow of a tracksuited poet, but one who has taken the guise of a man in love will indiscriminately eat and drink platefuls of thistles, barrels of vinegar."

"The world is a never-ending cross-reference."

"In a radical democracy in which everybody should be able to co-decide, not everyone meets the [criteria of] competence, preparedness to serve the common interest and economic independence. That's why this form should be rejected. Every four years, the citizen can give his judgement on government policy in all openness, and in this manner have influence. For this, it is necessary however that the citizen is well informed. That is a task of the government."

"The USA will remain the only superpower. China is becoming an economic giant. Europe is being Islamicized."

"If we fail in our efforts to achieve harmonisation of patent law relating to computer-implemented inventions in the European Union, we may well be confronted with a renegotiation of the European Patent Convention. The process of renegotiating the European Patent Convention would not require any contribution from this Parliament."