To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are |
To dispose a soul to action we must upset its equilibrium |
To have a grievance is to have a purpose in life |
To know a person's religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance |
To our real, naked selves there is not a thing on earth or in heaven worth dying for. It is only when we see ourselves as actors in a staged (and therefore unreal) performance that death loses its frightfulness and finality and becomes an act of make-believe and a theatrical gesture. It is one of the main tasks of a real leader to mask the grim reality of dying and killing by evoking in his followers the illusion that they are participating in a grandiose spectacle, a solemn or lighthearted dramatic performance. |
To spell out the obvious is often to call it into question |
To the excessively fearful the chief characteristic of power is its arbitrariness. Man had to gain enormously in confidence before he could conceive an all-powerful God who obeys his own laws. |
To the intellectual, America's unforgivable sin is that it has revolutions without revolutionaries, and achieves the momentous in a matter-of-fact way |
To the old, the new is usually bad news. |
Unpredictability, too, can become monotonous |
We all have private ails. The troublemakers are they who need public cures for their private ails. |
We are least open to precise knowledge concerning the things we are most vehement about. |
We are more prone to generalize the bad than the good. We assume that the bad is more potent and contagious. |
We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand |
We can remember minutely and precisely only the things which never really happened |