Even those fortunate ones among us who get sex right don’t necessarily feel compelled to talk about it. For all they know, everybody else is having the same experience. Sex being a naturally private act, we don’t share experiences with others the...
They should." "Should be like a wood bee," she said. It was a private joke, a mocking appreciation of the slipperiness of even the simplest hope, a nonce catchphrase like so many others lifted from favorite movies or TV shows that served as a rote su...
It is curious that people tend to regard government as a quasi-divine, selfless, Santa Claus organization. Government was constructed neither for ability nor for the exercise of loving care; government was built for the use of force and for necessari...
But the same spirits of analogy will authorise me to assert that ours are the most tender. Man is more robust than woman, but he is not longer-lived; which exactly explains my view of the nature of their attachment. Nay, it would be too hard upon you...
Earth is not a private club; it is a universal club. Being born allows you to receive a membership card; you don’t have to do anything else for it. And it is the most beautiful club that you will ever find. Once you have realized that you are a mem...
How do I feel today? I feel as unfit as an unfiddle, And it is the result of a certain turbulence in the mind and an uncertain burbulence in the middle. What was it, anyway, that angry thing that flew at me? I am unused to banshees crying Boo at me. ...
I hate solitude, but I'm afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company which I need is the company which a pub or a cafe will prov...
It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that we should therefore leave off being religious at all. By being religious we establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the on...
A man treats his own faults as original sin and supposes them scattered everywhere with the seed of Adam. He supposes that men have then added their own foreign vices to the solid and simple foundation of his own private vices. It would astound him t...
Lord Peter was hampered in his career as a private detective by a public school education. Despite Parker's admonitions, he was not always able to discount it. His mind had been warped in its young growth by "Raffles" and "Sherlock Holmes," or the se...
Nothing in the Bible encourages us to give sex the exalted status it has in our culture, as if finding our purpose, our identity, and our fulfillment all rest with what we can or cannot do with our private parts.
See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinio...
She had been born knowing that boldness erased fear, while cowardice invited it and earned her only more ill treatment. No matter how she shook with dread in private, she would never show fear before her questioners or her guards. In men's minds fear...
I know I have a reputation that is not so flattering, but I guess I owe it to just being a private person. I don't mean anyone harm, and I'm not being mean. I just don't socialise much; I don't party too much. I don't know what to say to the media if...
The Nobel Prize is the best thing that can happen to a writer in terms of how it affects your contracts, the publishers, and the seriousness with which your work is taken. On the other hand, it does interfere with your private life, or it can if you ...
For a writer, it seems a help rather than a hindrance to be at least a little crazy. Who but a crazy person would carve out a very private, quiet place in the world, only to pour his/her innermost thoughts and emotions onto a page for the entire worl...
("A Free Market in Education: The Answer to Prayer, And Other Issues") No matter where you are on the issue, there is no solution to it within a government school context, only perpetual conflict. The answer involves choice, competition and private a...
[T]he strongest defense of the humanities lies not in the appeal to their utility — that literature majors may find good jobs, that theaters may economically revitalize neighborhoods — but rather in the appeal to their defiantly nonutilitarian ch...
History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetites, which shake the public with the same —“tro...
It's almost hard to imagine anything more undemocratic than the view that political officials should not debate American wars in public, but only express concerns 'privately with the administration.' That's just a small sliver of Johnson's radicalism...
Husbands and wives, recognize that in marriage you have become one flesh. If you live for your private pleasure at the expense of your spouse, you are living against yourself and destroying your joy. But if you devote yourself with all your heart to ...