The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the assassination of Allende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the war in the Sinai Desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai, and so on and so forth until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten. In times when history still moved slowly, events were few and far between and easily committed to memory. They formed a commonly accepted backdrop for thrilling scenes of adventure in private life. Nowadays, history moves at a brisk clip. A historical event, though soon forgotten, sparkles the morning after with the dew of novelty. No longer a backdrop, it is now the adventure itself, an adventure enacted before the backdrop of the commonly accepted banality of private life.

No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.

People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of li…

Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.

You may well ask why I write. And yet my reasons are quite many. For it is not unusual in human beings who have witnessed the sack of a city or the falling to …

My generation is haunted by the images of the Jewish children in the ghettos and the concentration camps. The crimes committed against them caused us grieve th…

I thank God, I shall never again visit a slave-country. To this day, if I hear a distant scream, it recalls with painful vividness my feelings, when passing a …