“It is surprising,” Roosevelt explained, “how much reading a man can do in time usually wasted.”

“Washington was a typical American. Napoleon was a typical Frenchman, but Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country - bigger than all the Presidents together. We are still too near to his greatness,' (Leo) Tolstoy (in 1908) concluded, 'but after a few centuries more our posterity will find him considerably bigger than we do. His genius is still too strong and powerful for the common understanding, just as the sun is too hot when its light beams directly on us.' (748)”

“Push too far into independence and we disconnect and hurt each other. Then in a longing for togetherness, we seek each other out; fumbling around for the warmth of the other. Push too far into intimacy and we get afraid of losing ourselves in it and head the other way. It is the ongoing interplay between independence and intimacy.”

“Well chaps first I'd like to say a few vile things more or less at random, not only because it is expected of me but also because I enjoy it.”

“Preoccupation with real evil is the greatest difference between right and left. The right was preoccupied with fighting Communism while the left (not liberals such as JFK, but the left) was preoccupied with fighting anti-Communists. The right today is preoccupied with fighting Islamism; the left is preoccupied with fighting ‘Islamophobia”

“I make the road. I draw the map. Nothing just happens to me...I'm the one happening.”

“Blind people are the best audience; they will be treated according to the formula; it’s easy to excite them; it’s easy to wake them up from a dream in which they dull, mute and helpless, await excitement—another product of the plastic reality, another star-studded name.”

“The ache in my chest hurt again. I didn’t know how to be me without her.”