One can never ask anyone to change a feeling. - Susan Sontag

Harrowing photographs do not inevitably lose their power to shock. But they are not much help if the task is to understand.

Nothing can match the elation of the chronically melancholy when joy arrives. But before being allowed to arrive, it must lay siege to the weary heart. Let me in, it mews, it bellows. The heart must be forced.

Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.