'…you can do this thing or not do it…'

—The state, and your furious mother, when you're four.

The state calls you by all your names; intimates, by less than one.

Famous people are called by two names, familiar people by one. When writers want a character to loom larger for us they make the other characters call her constantly by her full name.

Grietzerian line from Lichtenberg: 'What leaning on your right elbow means after you have been leaning on your left for an hour'.

Hardly anyone speaks to my experience. Hardly anyone speaks from his own; nor do I.

This corruption goes all the way to the top!!

'Critics exchange emails' is one of the worst formats for journalism ever.

'A new free-thinker has published an exhaustive Treatise of Human Nature, 2 volumes, octavo. In it he attempts to introduce the correct method of philosophizing into moral matters, examining and explaining, first of all, the characteristics of the human understanding and then the effects. The author's evil intentions are sufficiently betrayed in the sub-title of the work, taken from Tacitus: Rara temporum felicitas, ubi sentire, quae velis, & quae sentias, dicere, licet.'

(Seldom are men blessed with times in which they may think what they like, and say what they think.)