I never can understand how anyone can not smoke — it deprives a man of the best part of life … with a good cigar in his mouth a man is perfectly safe… - Thomas Mann

Such a meeting of German demands will again be in order after Hitler’s fall. But for the present any yielding to Nazi threats means a cruel and discouraging blow to those forces among the German people that are sincerely working toward freedom and peace; and since German demands that issue from National-Socialism are never aimed at peace, but exclusively at an increase of power and the improvement of its military position, their fulfilment does not serve peace but war.

This was Venice, the flattering and suspect beauty — this city, half fairy tale and half tourist trap, in whose insalubrious air the arts once rankly and voluptuously blossomed, where composers have been inspired to lulling tones of somniferous eroticism.

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