To use the past to justify the present is bad enough—but it’s just as bad to use the present to justify the past.

If the charter of your liberties entails death and despair for untold multitudes, then it is nothing but a license for slaughter.

The government to you is what God is to agnostics--only to be invoked when your own well being is at stake.

How do you lose a word? Does it vanish into your memory, like an old toy in a cupboard, and lie hidden in the cobwebs and dust, waiting to be cleaned out or rediscovered?

What would it be like if I had something to defend - a home, a country, a family - and I found myself attacked by these ghostly men, these trusting boys? How do you fight an enemy who fights with neither enmity nor anger but in submission to orders from superiors, without protest and without conscience?

I know nothing of this silence except that it lies outside the reach of my intelligence, beyond words - that is why this silence must win, must inevitably defeat me, because it is not a presence at all.

(He) was in love with the idea of revolution. Men like that, even when they turn their backs on their party and their comrades, can never let go of the idea: it's the secret god that rules their hearts. It is what makes them come alive they revel in the danger, the exquisite pain. It is to them what childbirth is to a woman, or war to a mercenary.