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in our private moments we Americans are running just as fast and fearfully as we were then, running away from the darkness we know to lie behind so many apparently tranquil household doors, away from the nightmares that continue to be injected into children’s skulls by people whom Nature tells them they should love and trust, running ever faster and in ever greater numbers toward those potions, powders, priests, and philosophies that promise to obliterate such fears and nightmares, and ask in return only slavish devotion.
“The doctors here, the newspapers, the judges, they’d like to think that only a madman would shoot a five-year-old girl in the head. It creates certain…difficulties, if we are forced to accept that our society can produce sane men who commit such acts.”
you cannot objectify the subjective, you cannot generalize the specific.
The fact that you cannot understand it does not mean that it doesn’t exist.
A series of tall chimneys rose out of various buildings on the grounds and completed the image of a very dreary factory, one whose principal product, by that point in its history, was human misery.
Scientists’ minds may jump around like amorous toads, but they do seem to accept such behavior in one another.
How does one know when it’s time to stop looking at all possibilities and pursue one course?” I thought about that for a moment. “We can’t know,” I finally decided. “We don’t have the experience.
Gone, on Saturday, were the verdant, rolling fields of New Jersey and Maryland: all around us the scraggly countryside of Connecticut and Massachusetts crept awkwardly down to Long Island Sound and the sea beyond, bringing to mind the hard life that had made such mean, contentious people out of the farmers and merchants of New England. Not that one needed such an indirect indication of what life in that quarter of the country was like; human exemplars were sitting all around us.
A troubled sunset that seemed to promise rain reached out over eastern Massachusetts, as the fringes of Boston slowly gave way to mile after mile of monotonous, rocky farmland.
Rolling through the impossibly quaint streets of Newton, as numbingly picturesque a community as one could hope to find even in New England, I began to get the disturbingly familiar feeling of being trapped by narrow lanes and narrow minds, a kind of anxiety that had often consumed me during my time at Harvard.
in our dash to defeat evil, we had only given it a wider field in which to run its own wretched course.
It is never easier to understand the mind of a bomb-wielding anarchist than when standing amid a crush of those ladies and gentlemen who have the money and the temerity to style themselves “New York Society.” Suited, gowned, bejeweled, and perfumed, the fabled Four Hundred top families in the city, along with their various relations and hangers-on, can shove, snipe, gossip, and gorge with an abandon that the amused onlooker might find fascinating but the unfortunate interloper will deem nothing short of deplorable.
