The Human Condition

"An easy-going non-self-denying life will never be one of power."

"not paintings in the usual sense, they are life and death merging in fearful union."

"Segregation is evil; there is no pattern of life which can dehumanize men as can the way of segregation."

"There are names written in her immortal scroll, at which FAME blushes!"

"It is from the graves and ruins and rubbish-heaps of Egypt that writings have been restored to us in great numbers."

"Excerpt from More of My Life by A. J. Ayer"

"This stuff's so fine Julius Caesar called for it with his dying breath. 'A toot, Brutus,' is what he said."

"With the neutron bomb, which destroys life but not property, capitalism has found the weapon of its dreams."

"With a mind not diseased, a holy life is a life of hope; and at the end of it, death is a great act of hope."

"Things are opaque to us, and we are opaque to ourselves."

"I said, “When you are on your deathbed, Erran, pray that you never meet me in the place you are going to."

"... an objectively grave matter has been reduced to a question of the mother’s convenience."

"Death is for many of us the gate of hell; but we are inside on the way out, not outside on the way in."

"A man's power and intelligence are limited. He who wants to do everything will never do anything. Only too well do we know those people of uncertain ability who say: "I could be a great musician."..."Business would be easy for me."..."I could surely make success in politics." We may be certain that they will always be amateur musicians, failures in business, and beaten politicians. Napoleon held that the art of war consisted of making oneself strongest at a certain point; in life we must choose a point of attack and concentrate our forces there. The choice of a career must not be left to chance."

"It is the things which Ausonius reveals unconsciously that win him liking, not those which he sets out to celebrate with a kind of innocent pomp: not the chair of rhetoric at twenty-five, nor the imperial tutorship in his fifties, nor the consulship at sixty-nine, but that he loved and taught rhetoric all his life, and kept his simplicity."