The best an American can look forward to is the lonely pleasure of one who stands at long last on a chilly and inhospitable mountaintop where few hav… - George F. Kennan

There is another difficulty that confronts me when I try to describe my early self. In my youthful consciousness, more, perhaps, than in the case of many others, the borderline between external and internal realities was unfirm. I lived, particularly in childhood but with lessening intensity right on to middle age, in a world that was peculiarly and intimately my own, scarcely to be shared with others or even made plausible to them.

I am like a person who has placed poison in one of two glasses before a person he loves—and looks back upon his act with horror and incredulity—but still does not know from which glass the person will drink.

In the fabric of human events, one thing leads to another. Every mistake is in a sense the product of all the mistakes that have gone before it, from which fact it derives a sort of cosmic forgiveness; and at the same time every mistake is in a sense the determinant of all the mistakes of the future, from which it derives a sort of cosmic unforgiveableness.