The days of peace and slumberous calm are fled.
What the trees can do handsomely-greening and flowering, fading and then the falling of leaves-human beings cannot do with dignity, let alone without pain.
People often say, with pride, 'I'm not interested in politics. ' They might as well say, 'I'm not interested in my standard of living, my health, my job, my rights, my freedoms, my future or any future. '. . . If we mean to keep any control over our world and lives, we must be interested in politics.
I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.
Gradually I came to realize that people will more readily swallow lies than truth, as if the taste of lies was homey, appetizing: a habit.
After a lifetime of war-watching, I see war as an endemic human disease, and governments are the carriers.
Americans did not acquire their fear neurosis as the result of a traumatic experience - war devasting their country, pestilence sweeping the land, famine wiping out helpless millions. Americans had to be taught to hate and fear an unseen enemy. The teachers were men in official positions, in government, men whom Americans normally trust without question.
I always like doing things that no one's ever done before. Doing things a little out of the ordinary.
I write to be recorder, observer, participant, and sometimes, even judge. I want to engage the world as I see it with my whole self - all of those different aspects of it.
He was as honest as any criminal can hope to be.
Fear is a bigger disability than having no arms and no legs.