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What were the phenomena of the world today? If I knew little else, I knew the answer — war, and the preparations for new war.

Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen.

Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.

There was that law of life so cruel and so just which demanded that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.

Why is war so much like a practical joke? she thinks. Hiding behind bushes, leaping out, with not much difference between Boo! and Bang! except the blood.

“Life is warped. I'm just in sync.”

And all the bright young people of his youth had butted their heads, smashed against things until they got weaker and the things still stood.

For that is the genius of the old man — Tolstoy teaches us that compassion is of value and enriches our life only when compassion is severe, which is to say when we can perceive everything that is good and bad about a character but are still able to feel that the sum of us as human beings is probably a little more good than awful … That fine edge in Tolstoy, the knowledge that compassion is valueless without severity (for otherwise it cannot defend itself against sentimentality), gave The Naked and the Dead whatever enduring virtue it may possess and catapulted the amateur who wrote it into the grim ranks of those successful literary men and women who are obliged to become professional in order to survive …

A nation fights well in proportion to the amount of men and materials it has. And the other equation is that the individual soldier in that army is a more effective soldier the poorer his standard of living has been in the past.

I hate everything which is not in myself.

“Gender roles suck," says Swift Fox. Then you should stop playing them, thinks Toby.

The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.