Never forget the power of silence, that massively disconcerting pause which goes on and on and may at last induce an opponent to babble and backtrack nervously.

The real 1960s began on the afternoon of November 22, 1963. It came to seem that Kennedy’s murder opened some malign trap door in American culture, and the wild bats flapped out.

The Clinton’s secret is that they live in a morally discontinuous universe-events do not have consequences, and what happened 15 minutes ago has no connection to what happens now. Beware of power when it masters the secret of popular amnesia.

A day cannot live in infamy without the nourishment of rage. Let’s have rage.

Africa has a genious for extremes, for the beginning and the end. It seems simultaneously connected to some memory of Eden and to some foretaste of apocalypse. Nowhere is day more vivid or night darker. Nowhere are forests more luxuriant. Nowhere is there a continent more miserable.

As American productivity, once the exuberant engine of national wealth, has dipped to an embarrassingly uncompetitive low, Americans have shaken their heads: the country’s old work ethic is dead.

One can live with the thought of one’s own death. It is the thought of the death of the words and books that is terrifying for that is the deeper extinction.

The busybodies have begun to infect American society with a nasty intolerance – a zeal to police the private lives of others and hammer them into standard forms – A Nation of Finger Pointers.

For now, we assume that self-evolving robots will learn to mimic human traits, including, eventually, humor. And so, I can’t wait to hear the first joke that one robot tells to another robot.

Abstinence is a window of clarity through which one can better find one’s work and one’s mate.