Sympathy is why when a man is getting mugged, you let him keep his shirt after you take his life. Funerals are respectable affairs, after all.

Artists are the serfs of a leisure society.

Political debate: when charlatans come together to discuss their principles.

Alphabet: a symbolic system used in algebra, with applications that have yet to be discovered by dyslexics and two thirds of college graduates.

I don’t read biographies for moral instruction, or for a history lesson. I want to know what people are saying about me.

The idealist hopes. The romantic sees doom. The postmodernist sees doom and hopes.