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The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of...

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.

I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.

Clevinger is a very bright guy, a Harvard man, who knows everything about literature except how to enjoy it.

There is no Pris," he said. "Only Rachael Rosen, over and over again.

The classic resignation. Mechanical, intellectual acceptance of that which a genuine organism––with two billion years of the pressure to live and evolve hagriding it––could never have...

Every family is a ghost story.

For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if...

I also believe that parents, if they love you, will hold you up safely, above their swirling waters, and sometimes that means you'll never know what they endured, and you may treat them unkindly, in a...

Trees spend all day looking up at God.

That was the end of his driving.. That was the end of his walking free.. That was the end of his privacy.. And that was the end of his secret.

It's such a shame to waste time. We always think we have so much of it.

He felt imprisoned in an airplane. In an airplane there was absolutely no place in the world to go except to another part of the airplane.

That's not what justice is," the colonel jeered, and began pounding the table again with his big fat hand. "That's what Karl Marx is. I'll tell you what justice is. Justice is a knee in the gut from...

The word has not been recognized as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host.

Things change when you're not in danger anymore.

But that was war. Just about all he could find in its favor was that it paid well and liberated children from the pernicious influence of their parents.

Art is a kind of magic. Creativity is mysterious, even to artists, who might be able to name their inspiration but can't always explain how their influences and experiences came together to create...

Don't go chasing after the grand theme, the idea, I told my students, as if it is separate from the story itself. The idea or ideas behind the story must come to you through the experience of the...

We were all victims of the arbitrary nature of a totalitarian regime that constantly intruded into the most private corners of our lives and imposed its relentless fictions on us. Was this rule the...

Again she repeated that she would never get married, never ever. She said that for her a man always existed in books, that she would spend the rest of her life with Mr. Darcy-even in the books, there...

Both Yassi and I know that we have been losing our faith. We have been questioning it with every move. During the Shah's time, it was different. I felt I was in the minority and I had to guard my...

Ourworld in that living room with its window framing my beloved Elburz Mountains became oursanctuary, our self-contained universe, mocking the reality of black-scarved, timid faces in the citythat...

You've got to have a God. Without God, you might turn to something really crazy, like witchcraft, or religion.

The heart doesn't know it's expanding with compassion anymore than a hawk spreading its swings knows it's being a hawk. Nor does someone acting out of love often realize they are being kind.

When my mother entered, wearing her nurse's outfit, her arms full of magazines, we must have said, Hi Mom too quickly, because she immediately became suspicious. You can see that in your mother's face...

Had I been able to formulate my first impressions of the United States, I might have said that there was a place in America called Kansas, where people could find a magic land at the heart of a...

The Islamic Revolution, as it turned out, did more damage to Islam by using it as an instrument of oppression than any alien ever could have done.

Resentment had erased all ambiguity in our encounters with people like him; we had been polarized into us and them.

You see this is a chair, but when you come to describe it, you do so from where you are positioned, and from your own perspective, and so you cannot say there is only one way of seeing a chair, can...

After the revolution, almost all the activities one associated with being out in public-seeing movies, listening to music, sharing drinks or a meal with friends-shifted to private homes. It was...

"How are you, Yossarian?" "Splendidly." No, I'm terribly afraid. "All right then," said Major Danby. "It's proof that he's alive."