She carried within herself a great fund of life, and her deepest enjoyment was to feel the continuity between the movement of her own heart and the agitations of the world. For this reason, she was fond of seeing great crowds, and large stretches of country, of reading about revolutions and wars, of looking at historical pictures--a class of efforts to which she had often gone so far as to forgive much bad painting for the sake of the subject.

It had been agreed between them that lighted candles at wayside inns, in strange countries amid mountain scenery, gave the evening meal a peculiar poetry.

One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.

The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it-this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education.

“A nation that can't control its energy sources can't control its future.” 

“A nation ringed by walls will only imprison itself.” 

“In war, the first casualty is truth.” 

“Can a nation be free if it oppresses other nations? It cannot.” 

“And is it not sects, bodies of definite, uncompromising principles, that lead us into revolutions?” 

“America, like a few other nations, has become characteristic for the depth of the abyss that divide a handful of brutal millionaires who are stagnating in a mire of luxury, and millions of laboring starving men and women who are always staring want in the face.” 

“The revolution does not need historians.” 

“Capitalists can buy themselves out of any crisis, so long as they make the workers pay” 

“Exchange, fair or unfair,always presupposes and includes the rule of the bourgeoisie.” 

“Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.” 

“American ethics”, which the European professors and well-meaning bourgeois so hypocritically deplore, have, in the age of finance capital, become the ethics of literally every large city in any country.” 

“If you see oppression of the poor, and justice and righteousness trampled in a country, do not be astounded.”

“If we really want to achieve a healthy world economy, what is needed at this juncture of history is a more efficient way of interacting which, with due regard for the sovereignty of each nation, ensures the economic well-being of all countries, not just of a few. 207.” 

The hippie movement politicized my generation. When it ended, we all started looking back at our own history, looking, in my case, for motives of rebellion.

If you hear Anarchy in the UK today your hair stands on end. It gives you the shivers.

“In the ’80s, we at least had the idea of diplomacy.”

Europe itself is an embodiment of this diversity.

I held a conference in Harvard where Americans said they didn't believe in risk. They thought it was just European hysteria. Then the terrorist attacks happened and there was a complete conversion. Suddenly terrorism was the central risk.

Relinquishing apparent national sovereignty does not have to entail a loss of national sovereignty, but can actually be a benefit.