The public’s evaluation of the job George W. Bush is doing as president changed dramatically as a result of the horrific attacks of September 11 and his response in leading the country on a campaign against terrorism

But even those five-and-forty minutes were too long, the bored me
and boredom is the coldest thing in the world.

Who can understand the deeply bonded alloy of order and intemperance that is its foundation?

since for me speaking French is like speaking without saying anything somehow – with no responsibilities, the way we speak in a dream.

But was it not true that there were people, certain individuals, whom one found it impossible to picture dead, precisely because they were so vulgar? That was to say: they seemed so fit for life, so good at it, that they would never die, as if they were unworthy of the consecration of death

romping in pedagogically forbidden territory

Solitude favors the original, the daringly and otherworldly beautiful, the poem. But it also favors the wrongful, the extreme, the absurd, and the forbidden.

Don’t you love to look at coffins? I’ve always enjoyed looking at one now and then. I think of a coffin as an absolutely lovely piece of furniture, even when it’s empty, and if there’s someone lying in it, it’s really quite sublime in my eyes.

Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul.

We are not separate and independent entities, but like links in a chain, and we could not by any means be what we are without those who went before us and showed us the way.

Redistricting is a deeply political process, with incumbents actively seeking to minimize the risk to themselves (via bipartisan gerrymanders) or to gain additional seats for their party (via partisan gerrymanders)

He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.

Speech is civilization itself

What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.

In addition to the decline in competition, American politics today is characterized by a growing ideological polarization between the two major political parties.

What pleases the public is lively and vivid delineation which makes no demands on the intellect; but passionate and absolutist youth can only be enthralled by a problem.

Technology and comfort – having those, people speak of culture, but do not have it

One must die to life in order to be utterly a creator

He may have been waiting a long while, in snow or rain, yet his joy at my final appearance knows no resentment at my faithlessness, though I have neglected him all day and brought his hopes to naught

He was simply not a “hero”, which is to say, he did not let his relationship with the man be determined by the woman.

Travelers prove their lack of education if they make fun of the customs and values of their hosts, and the qualities that do a person honour are many and varied.

Which seemed to hover in a limbo between creation and decay .

Responsibility for overseeing the implementation of election law typically resides with partisan officials, many with public stakes in the election outcome.

For our sin God had visited our bodies with the gruesome ignominy of rot and decay, there was no indignity in the same body’s receiving

It’s hard to keep going when it seems like you’re not getting anywhere, but you’ll never succeed if you stop. Those of us with a dream that seems so far from being realized must remember that the road is long, but only those who stay on the path will reach their destination

Incumbency adds a layer of advantage on top of this party dominance. But rather than foster an environment in which members of Congress feel free to buck popular sentiment and wrestle seriously with the problems confronting the country, it reinforces the ideological divide between the parties

Often I have thought of the day when I gazed for the first time at the sea.
The sea is vast, the sea is wide, my eyes roved far and wide and longed to be
free. But there was the horizon. Why a horizon, when I wanted the infinite
from life?

Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictions word, preserves contact – it is silence which isolates.

He took in the squeaky music, the vulgar and pining melodies, because passion immobilizes good taste and seriously considers what soberly would be thought of as funny and to be resented

A stimulus is a stimulus. The body doesn’t give a damn about the meaning of the stimulus. Whether minnows or communion, the sebaceous glands stand up erect

Mere knowledge of human psychology would in itself infallibly make us despondent if we were not cheered and kept alert by the satisfaction of expressing it.

I hope that you have nothing against malice, my good engineer. In my eyes it is the brightest sword that reason has against the powers of darkness and ugliness. Malice, sir, is the spirit of criticism, and criticism marks the origin of progress and enlightenment.

Democracy is eternal and human. It dignifies the human being; it respects humanity.

I don’t think anyone is thinking long-term now

You will lead, you will strike up the march of the future, boys will swear by your name, and thanks to your madness they will no longer need to be mad

His yearning for new and faraway places, his desire for freedom, relief and oblivion was as he admitted to himself, an urge to flee-an urge to get away from his work, from the everyday site of a cold, rigid, and passionate servitude.

Everything is politics

Greatness! Extraordinariness! Conquest of the world and immortality of the name! What good was all the happiness of people eternally unknown compared with this goal?

At thirty a man steps out of the darkness and wasteland of preparation into active life it is the time to show oneself, the time of fulfillment

The Freudian theory is one of the most important foundation stones for an edifice to be built by future generations, the dwelling of a freer and wiser humanity.

But sometimes a person begins with opinions and judgments and valid criticisms, but then things creep in that have nothing to do with forming opinions, and then it’s all over with strict logic, and what you end up with is an absurd world republic and beautiful style.

War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.

It’s every American’s duty to support his government but not necessarily in the style to which it has become accustomed

A harmful truth is better than a useful lie

We don’t love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities

Aschenbach stated outright that nearly everything great owes its existence to “despites”: despite misery

I get an odd, intimate, and amusing sensation from having him sit on my foot and warm it with the blood-heat of his body. A pervasive feeling of sympathy and good cheer fills me, as almost invariably when in his company and looking at things from his angle

Second, the President’s popularity has not translated into increased support for the Republican party or for the policies and approaches on domestic policy championed by the President

Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.

The experience of death must ultimately be the experience of life, or else it is only a wraith

All of this suggests that while citizens became more comfortable with President Bush after September 11 and thought him to have the requisite leadership skills, they continue to harbor doubts about his priorities, loyalties, interests, and policies

For to be poised against fatality, to meet adverse conditions gracefully, is more than simple endurance; it is an act of aggression, a positive triumph

Incumbents are safe, but party majorities are not. This fosters symbolic votes, message politics and little serious legislating in Congress

Jewelry, a hot bath, and rest have often made a difference

This yearning for new and distant scenes, this craving for freedom, release, forgetfulness
they were he admitted to himself, an impulse towards flight, flight from the spot which was the daily theatre of a rigid, cold, and passionate service

For passion, like crime does not sit well with the sure order and even course of everyday life. It welcomes every loosening of the social fabric, every confusion and affliction visited upon the world, for passion sees in such a disorder a vague hope of finding advantage for itself

America is an outlier in the world of democracies when it comes to the structure and conduct of elections

Only death dignifies our sufferings in the eyes of others.

Further-more, partisan attachments powerfully shape political perceptions, beliefs and values, and incumbents enjoy advantages well beyond the way in which their districts are configured.

Disease, and most specially opprobrious, suppressed, secret disease, creates a certain critical opposition to the world, to mediocre life, disposes a man to be obstinate and ironical toward civil order, so that he seeks refuge in free thought, in books, in study

Begin all over again? It would be no good. It would all turn out the same – all happen again just as it has happened. For certain people are For certain people are bound to go astray because for them no such thing as a right way exists

War! It is purification, liberation, an enormous hope … The victory of Germany will be a paradox, nay, a wonder: a victory of the soul over numbers … The German soul is opposed to the pacifist ideal of civilization, for is not peace the element, of civil corruption?

Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.

Disease makes men more physical, it leaves them nothing but body.

In Kant and Nietzsche we have the moralists of German militarism

An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.

Myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless pattern, the pious formula, into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious.

When life still hesitates to touch us, when neither duty nor guilt dares lay a hand upon us

Thomas Mann used to write education novels and now you can write an education memoir, and there are all these memoirs coming out now about people’s relationships with books. Like anything else, these can be good or bad. The genre doesn’t make it good or bad, it’s the execution

It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death

The child of civilization, remote from birth from wild nature and all her ways, is more susceptible to her grandeur than is her untutored son who has looked at her and lived close to her from childhood up, on terms of prosaic familiarity. The

There is only one real misfortune: to forfeit one’s own good opinion of oneself. Lose your complacency, once betray your own self-contempt and the world will unhesitatingly endorse it

In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.

I stand between two worlds. I am at home in neither, and I suffer in consequence. You artists call me a bourgeois, and the bourgeois try to arrest me … I don’t know which makes me feel worse

The average man thinks that a little falseness goes with beauty.

It might well be that getting used to things up here was simply a matter of getting used to not getting used to them – but

That was one of the advantages of his age, that he could be sure of his mastery in every moment.

Some of necessities go astray, because for them there is no such thing as a right path.

He probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word

The books and magazines streamed in. He could buy them all, they piled up around him and even while he read, the number of those still to be read disturbed him. … they stood in rows, weighing down his life like a possession which he did not succeed in subordinating to his personality

Passionate – that means to live for the sake of living. But one knows that you all live for sake of experience. Passion, that is self-forgetfulness. But what you all want is self-enrichment

Congress requires states to draw single-member districts.

With the parties at virtual parity and the ideological gulf between them never greater, the stakes of majority control of Congress are extremely high.

Democrats do best in urban centers, Republicans in outer suburbs and rural areas

Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life

Order and simplification are the first steps towards mastery of a subject

For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts

The writer’s joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought

Votes in federal elections are cast and counted in a highly decentralized and variable fashion, with no uniform ballots and few national standards

Whoever is unable to stand up for an ideal with his person, his arm, his blood, is unworthy of that ideal, and no matter how intellectual one may become, what matters is that one remains a man.

The country has sorted itself ideologically into the two political parties, and those partisan attachments have hardened in recent years. It will take an extraordinary event and act of leadership to break this partisan divide. I thought 9/11 might provide such an opportunity, but it was not seized

Her smile and voice suggested the kind of excitement that comes when the first words in a long, silent relationship are spoken at last – a subtle excitement secretly incorporating into this one moment everything that has happened until now.

A man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own

While Republican voters have remained universally supportive of their President, Democrats and Independents are returning to a more naturally critical stance.

Deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?

Democracy is timelessly human, and timelessness always implies a certain amount of potential youthfulness

Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading
that is a good life. A day that closely resembles every other day of the past ten or twenty years does not suggest itself as a good one. But who would not call Pasteur’s life a good one, or Thomas Mann’s?

Prayers and love are learned in the hour when prayer has become impossible and your heart has turned to stone

Shall we go away whenever life looks like turning in the slightest uncanny, or not quite normal, or even rather painful and mortifying? No, surely not. Rather stay and look matters in the face, brave them out; perhaps precisely in so doing lies a lesson for us to learn

Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present ?