When you have committed an action that you cannot bear to think about, that causes you to writhe in retrospect, do not seek to evade the memory: make… - Mary McCarthy

Ars longa vita brevis est was a truth that could not be argued with in the Eternal City.

[I]t is a mistake to think that an intellectual is required to be intelligent; there are occasions when the terms seem to be almost antonyms.

It struck her that becoming a Trotskyite had merely given him one more thing to be snobbish about. He now looked down his nose at Stalinists, progressives, and New Dealers, as well as on the middle class and the 'moneyed elements,' whom he had always derided. Some of his worst prejudices, she told him, scolding, were being reinforced by his new adherence. For example, coming from Massachusetts, he had a plaintive aversion to the Irish, and he was elated to hear that Marx had called the Irish the bribed tools of imperialism. 'Look at that bribed tool of imperialism!' he would whisper, of the poor policeman on the beat.