I wouldn't mind paying taxes - if I knew they were going to a friendly country.
If your desires are not great, a little will seem much to you; for small appetite makes poverty equivalent to wealth.
Every discourse, even a poetic or oracular sentence, carries with it a system of rules for producing analogous things and thus an outline of methodology.
I never give in to the temptation to be difficult just for the sake of being difficult. That would be too ridiculous.
Whatever precautions you take so the photograph will look like this or that, there comes a moment when the photograph surprises you. It is the other's gaze that wins out and decides.
Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: 'Here are our monsters,' without immediately turning the monsters into pets.
I'm the result of upbringing, class, race, gender, social prejudices, and economics. So I'm a victim again. A result.
As Plotinus tells us, we elected the body, the parents, the place, and the circumstances that suited the soul and that, as the myth says, belongs to its necessity.
Too many people have been analyzing their pasts, their childhoods, their memories, their parents, and realizing that it doesn't do anything-or that it doesn't do enough.
Our senses are indeed our doors and windows on this world, in a very real sense the key to the unlocking of meaning and the wellspring of creativity.
The line between angry young woman and grumpy old lady is very fine.
Global terrorism is extreme both in its lack of realistic goals and in its cynical exploitation of the vulnerability of complex systems.
From a moral point of view, there is no excuse for terrorist acts, regardless of the motive or the situation under which they are carried out.
After September 11, the European governments have completely failed. They are incapable of seeing beyond their own national scope of interests.
A threatened nation can react to uncertain dangers solely through administrative channels, to the truly embarrassing situation of perhaps overreacting.
Character forms a life regardless of how obscurely that life is lived and how little light falls on it from the stars.
An excellent man, like precious metal, is in every way invariable; A villain, like the beams of a balance, is always varying, upwards and downwards.
We are like chameleons, we take our hue and the color of our moral character, from those who are around us.
Even the handsomest men do not have the same momentary effect on the world as a truly beautiful woman does.
I was in fact pretty much - by the larger culture, by the local culture, by people around me, by people on TV - encouraged to imagine women as something slightly inferior to men.
Hearing that the same men who brought us 'South Park' were mounting a musical to be called 'The Book of Mormon,' we were tempted to turn away, as from an inevitable massacre.
