Why am I despising you when I'm about to change your life? - John le Carré

He met failure as one day he would probably meet death, with cynical resentment and the courage of a solitary.

It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.

America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War. The reaction to 9/11 is beyond anything Osama bin Laden could have hoped for in his nastiest dreams. As in McCarthy times, the freedoms that have made America the envy of the world are being systematically eroded. The combination of compliant US media and vested corporate interests is once more ensuring that a debate that should be ringing out in every town square is confined to the loftier columns of the East Coast press.