It is true, as Sartre once wrote, referring to French Army atrocities in Algeria, that the real tragedy in our time is that any of us can be, interchangeably, victim or torturer.
From Gore Vidal
Overcrowding in the cities is producing a collective madness in which irrational violence flourishes because man needs more space in which to be than the modern city allows.
Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin.
Since we have literally targeted our enemies, the Pentagon assumes that, sooner or later, rogues will take out our cities, presumably from spaceships.
World War II made prosperous the United States, which had been undergoing a depression for a dozen years, and made very rich those magnates and their managers who govern the republic - with many a wink - in the people's name.
All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.
Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.
The first grown-up book that I read on my own was a nineteenth-century edition of 'Tales from Livy' that I'd found in my grandfather's library.
Anybody who is stupid enough to want to be remembered deserves to be forgotten right now.
I'm a fervent foe of water pollution, whether it is our own Hudson River or Philadelphia's tap water.
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