There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
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Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.
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I have often noticed that a bribe has that effect -- it changes a relation. The man who offers a bribe gives away a little of his own importance; the bribe once accepted, he becomes the inferior, like a man who has paid for a woman.
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It is the story-teller's task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.
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It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
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Communism, my friend, is more than Marxism, just as Catholicism is more than the Roman Curia. There is a mystique as well as a politick. Catholics and Communists have committed great crimes, but at least they have not stood aside, like an established society, and been indifferent. I would rather have blood on my hands than water like Pilate.
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He Harris felt the loyalty we all feel to unhappiness -- the sense that that is where we really belong.
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Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim.
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God created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed -- that is the meaning of evolution.
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Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and simple, however cruel our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt.
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Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive: then the millstone weighs on the breast.
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Unhappiness in a child accumulates because he sees no end to the dark tunnel. The thirteen weeks of a term might just as well be thirteen years.
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Death's at the bottom of everything, Martins. Leave death to the professionals.
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A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to himself is only an ordinary man. It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous.
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Heresy is another word for freedom of thought.
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People who like quotations love meaningless generalizations.
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He felt the loyalty we feel to unhappiness -- the sense that is where we really belong.
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It is impossible to go through life without trust That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
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Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt.
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Reality in our century is not something to be faced.
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We are all of us resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.
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