A person who has been beaten with a stick all their life instinctively looks for a razor blade inside every gingerbread cookie.
Nationalism is an emergency mechanism for restoring trust within a narrow circle when general trust has been destroyed.
Cynicism is romanticism that got tired of waiting.
History is written not by peoples, but by individuals with their traumas and ambitions.
At first, we are architects. We are born a wild, unmapped landscape. Somewhere lies a swamp of secret wants, somewhere cliffs of irrational fear, somewhere clearings of pure, causeless joy. Very early on, though, an inner perfectionist wakes up with a master plan for the build-out. He isn’t a tyrant. He’s a decorator. He undertakes the...