“What is your idea of earthly happiness? To be vindicated in my own lifetime.”

“Scientists have an expression for hypotheses that are utterly useless even for learning from mistakes. They refer to them as being "not even wrong." Most so-called spiritual discourse is of this type.”

“What do you most value in your friends?Their continued existence.”

“About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. Very often, when I give my view that there is ...”

“It is exactly the fear of revenge that motivates the deepest crimes, from the killing of the enemy's children lest they grow up to play their own part, to the erasure of the enemy's graveyards and ...”

“It's probably a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory”

“Accept that what you see is what you'll get. Once your relationship becomes firmly established, your partner's personality and the way in which [he or] she treats you will most likely be what your ...”

“Remember one thing as South Africa prepares to go to the polls this week and the world grapples with the ascendancy of the African National Congress leader Jacob Zuma: South Africa is not Zimbabwe....”

“Volatile expressions of anger and hostility combined with a tendency to blame others often result from feeling shame.... If you are shame-prone, any accusation directed at you, regardless of how mi...”

“He had spent much of his childhood perched on the coast, with the taste of salt in the air: this was a place of woodland and river, mysterious and secretive in a different way from St. Mawes, the l...”

“A dull, decent people, cherishing and fortifying their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayonets.”

“[The official prosecutors] ... were more vengeful on behalf of our injuries than I myself could ever be.”