"Anything that isn't opposed by about 40 percent of humanity is either an evil business or so unimportant that it simply doesn't matter."

"Strategic thinkers were naturally rattled to find this outsider fooling around with their work. They had been thinking strategically when Reagan was just another movie actor playing opposite a chimpanzee, for heaven's sake. They think Reagan is too naive, too innocent, to grasp the intellectual complexities of cold war strategy."

"When it comes to cars, only two varieties of people are possible - cowards and fools."

"Children rarely want to know who their parents were before they were parents, and when age finally stirs their curiosity, there is no parent left to tell them."

"Loneliness expresses the pain of being alone and solitude expresses the glory of being alone."

"God is absence. God is the solitude of man."

"Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone."

"Scholarship was one thing, drudgery another. I very soon concluded that nothing would induce me to read, let alone make notes on, hundreds and hundreds of very, very, very boring books."