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We’re revolutionaries, and revolutionaries can never be innocent.
What am I dying for? he cried back. I’m dying because this world I’m living in isn’t worth dying for! If something is worth dying for, then you’ve got a reason to live.
Did we salivate for sadness, or had we only learned to enjoy what we were forced to eat?
No, because happiness, American style, is a zero-sum game, sir. Dr. Hedd slowly turned his head in an arc as he spoke, making sure that he saw every man in the room. For someone to be happy, he must measure his happiness against someone else’s unhappiness, a process which most certainly works in reverse. If I said I was happy, someone else must be unhappy, most likely one of you. But if I said I was unhappy, that might make some of you happier, but it would also make you uneasy, as no one is supposed to be unhappy in America. I believe our clever young man has intuited that while only the
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If the Orient has one inexhaustible resource, said the General, it is people.
It saddens me to come to this conclusion, but I have seen the evidence for myself, not only in books and archives, but in the battlefields of Burma. It must be said. Life is plentiful, life is cheap in the Orient. And as the philosophy of the Orient expresses it—Dr. Hedd paused—life is not important. Perhaps it is insensitive to say, but the Oriental does not put the same high price on life as the Westerner.
But you see, gentlemen, while life is only valuable to us—I paused again, and my audience inclined toward me by a millimeter or two—life is invaluable to the Westerner.
Love is being able to talk to someone else without effort, without hiding, and at the same time to feel absolutely comfortable not saying a word.
Sympathy alone would never persuade the rich to share willingly and the powerful to give up power voluntarily.
How could I forget that every truth meant at least two things, that slogans were empty suits draped on the corpse of an idea? The suits depended on how one wore them, and this suit was now worn out.
