“The new kings of the world will live tranquilly for a long time, confining themselves to devouring each other and being parasites among each other on a cottage industry scale.”

Darwin was not afraid to look deeply into the void. His bold view can be seen as either noble and pessimistic or noble and admirable.

Perhaps Kafka laughed when he told stories [. . . ] because one isn’t always equal to oneself.

The living are more demanding; the dead can wait.

It is neither easy nor agreeable to dredge this abyss of viciousness, and yet I think it must be done, because what could be perpetrated yesterday could be attempted again tomorrow, could overwhelm us and our children.

We have collectively witnessed a fundamental unexpected event, fundamental precisely because unexpected, not foreseen by anyone.

Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand [the Holocaust] is almost to justify.

For me chemistry represented an indefinite cloud of future potentialities which enveloped my life to come in black volutes torn by fiery flashes, like those which had hidden Mount Sinai. Like Moses, from that cloud I expected my law.

The origins of chemistry were ignoble, or at least equivocal: the dens of the alchemists, their abominable hodgepodge of ideas and language, their confessed interest in gold, their Levantine swindles typical of charlatans and magicians; instead.

We will not return No one must leave here and so carry to the world, together with the sign impressed on his skin, the evil tidings of what man’s presumption made of man in Auschwitz

But they do not battle: they are bound together by a strong alliance, by the common faith “in the validity of Maxwell’s or Boltzmann’s equations,” and by the common acceptance of Darwinism and the molecular structure of DNA.

This is the most immediate fruit of exile, of uprooting: the prevalence of the unreal over the real.

I am not even alive enough to know how to kill myself

Everyone dreamed past and future dreams, of slavery and redemption, of improbable paradises, of equally mythical and improbable enemies; cosmic enemies, perverse and subtle, who pervade everything like the air.

Dawn came on us like a betrayer; it seemed as though the new sun rose as an ally of our enemies to assist in our destruction.

In history and in life one sometimes seems to glimpse a ferocious law which states: to he that has, will be given; from he that has not, will be taken away.

I’m a libertine, but it’s not my specialty.

The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous.

Politeness is the art of choosing among your thoughts.

There is an idea abroad among moral people that they should make their neighbors good.

We struggled with it at Newcastle and we were not alone in that among the English clubs.

I was learning that among friends, a smile can be better than a belly laugh.

Go among the people. Don’t assume you know what church looks like.

Some succeed for a time. But while there may occasionally be mis-configurations among market prices that allow abnormal returns, they do not persist.

Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.