Welcome to Litsy!

When a stranger in a cafe in Zurich seized him by the mitt and exclaimed, "May I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses? " Joyce responded, "No--it did lots of other things too."

There's nothing like a good faction fight between extremists.

The "truth" is that religious Christians and Jews could still both be wrong. Jerusalem may not be a "holy city" at all, but just an archeological site that inspires bad behavior.

But what about Martin Luther King Jr., and Gandhi? I would reply, first, that if religious believers are not willing to accept the connection between faith and horror as necessary, they should be careful in proposing any close connection between faith and good works. The emancipation of black America and the independence of India were not sacred causes: they were fought by many people of no religion and opposed by many people of profound faith.

At no point does Michael Moore make the smallest effort to be subjective. At no moment does he pass up the chance of a cheap sneer. He pitilessly focuses his camera, for minutes after he should have turned it off, on a distraught and bereaved mother whose grief we have already shared. But then, this is the guy who thought it so clever and amusing to catch Charlton Heston, in Bowling for Columbine, at the onset of his senile dementia. Such courage.

This book put me past the 200,000 pages read mark.

Edna St. Vincent Millay hit on the truth long before Justice Blackman and Donald Cabana. "I shall die," she wrote in her poem Conscientious Objector, "but that is all that I shall do for Death." Me, too.

If you look closely at a milk crate, you will see an inscription confining its use to the crating of milk bottles and cartons by its owner, so don't go using it as a safety razor, say, or a contraceptive.

The essence of tyranny is not iron law. It is capricious law.

The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile and dangerous one. It involves, if it does not necessitate, the sleep of reason. There is no escape from anxiety and struggle.

There's a possible reason for the existence of this level of denial... A North Korean citizen who decided that it was all a lie and a waste would have to face the fact that his life had been a lie and a waste also... there might be a collective nervous breakdown if it was suddenly announced that the Great Leader had been a verbose and arrogant fraud. Picture, if you will, the abrupt deprogramming of more than 20 million Moonies ...