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It means you don’t like where you’ve been, the place where you are is grim, and the only place you see yourself going is not an improvement on what’s gone before.

That’s the army. But our job was to make the rest of you think it was safe and glorious and good, too. Boys into men? Discipline that isn’t self-discipline doesn’t mean thing to a boy.

“We’re not going to climb that in the dark, are we?” asked Iimmi.

“Better than in the light,” said Urson. “This way you can’t see how far you have to fall.”

A lesson which history should have taught us thousands of years ago was finally driven home. No man can wield absolute power over other men and still retain his own mind. For no matter how good his intentions are when he takes up the power, his alternate reason is that freedom, the freedom of other people and ultimately his own, terrifies him. Only a man afraid of freedom would want this power, who could conceive of wielding it. And that fear of freedom will turn him into a slave of this power.

'Most people think everybody feels about them much more violently than they actually do - they think other people's opinions of them swing through great arcs of approval or disapproval. '

Dictators during the entire history of this planet have used similar techniques. By not letting the people of their country know what conditions existed outside their boundaries, they could get the people to fight to stay in those conditions. It was the old adage: Convince a slave that he’s free, and he will fight to maintain his slavery.

"Think how you love me," she whispered. "I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night."

"The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing," he said. "Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged."

Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.

All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high explosive love.

One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pinprick, but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.

I like France, where everybody thinks he’s Napoleon — down here everybody thinks he’s Christ.