Yet friendship, I believe, is essential to intellectuals. It is probably the growth hormone the mind requires as it begins its activity of producing … - Hannah Arendt

You can date the evolving life of a mind, like the age of a tree, by the rings of friendship formed by the expanding central trunk.

We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words, you are the hero of your own story.

No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.

How many women, she wondered, had poisoned their husbands, not for gain or for another man, but out of sheer inability to leave them. The extreme solution is always the simplest. The weed killer is in the soup; the man is in his coffin.