The fact that for tens of thousands of years humanity has used warfare as a solution for states of disequilibrium has no more demonstrable value than the fact that in the same period humanity learned to resolve states of psychological imbalance by using alcohol or other equally devastating substances.

Not bad, not bad at all," Diotallevi said. "To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text.

But I must hope that books possess a life of a more varied kind than their authors' myopia concedes to them. A book is a kind of of machine which the reader can freely use as a generator of intellectual stimulation. It is enough that the book should be truly a machine for thinking, that it should generate a variety of possible conclusions without its author's ordaining and limiting them in advance.

The United States needed a civil war to unite properly.

And what would we be, we sinful creatures, without fear, perhaps the most foresighted, the most loving of the divine gifts?

With all of its defects, the global market makes war less likely, even between the U.S.A. and China.