You Are Not A Gadget by Jaron Lanier

★★☆☆☆ (2/5)

A selection of my favorite passages from the book

• I want to say: You have to be somebody before you can share yourself.
• The World Wide Web was flooded by a torrent of petty designs sometimes called web 2.0. This ideology promotes radical freedom on the surface of the web, but that freedom, ironically, is more for machines than people. Nevertheless, it is sometimes referred to as “open culture.”
• It is impossible to work with information technology without also engaging in social engineering.
• Antihuman rhetoric is fascinating in the same way that self-destruction is fascinating: it offends us, but we cannot look away.
• Cybernetic totalists love to think of the stuff as if it were alive and had its own ideas and ambitions. But what if information is inanimate? What if it’s even less than inanimate, a mere artifact of human thought? What if only humans are real, and information is not?
• Information of the kind that purportedly wants to be free is nothing but a shadow of our own minds, and wants nothing on its own. It will not suffer if it doesn’t get what it wants.
• If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you’ve let your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you?
• What these critics forget is that printing presses in themselves provide no guarantee of an enlightened outcome. People, not machines, made the Renaissance. The printing that takes place in North Korea today, for instance, is nothing more than propaganda for a personality cult. What is important about printing presses is not the mechanism, but the authors.
• An individual who is receiving a flow of reports about the romantic status of a group of friends must learn to think in the terms of the flow if it is to be perceived as worth reading at all. So here is another example of how people are able to lessen themselves so as to make a computer seem accurate.
• Without an independent press, composed of heroic voices, the collective becomes stupid and unreliable,
• What is crucial about modernity is that structure and constraints were part of what sped up the process of technological development, not just pure openness and concessions to the collective.
• I have tried to learn to be aware of the troll within myself. I notice that I can suddenly become relieved when someone else in an online exchange is getting pounded or humiliated, because that means I’m safe for the moment. If someone else’s video is being ridiculed on YouTube, then mine is temporarily protected. But that also means I’m complicit in a mob dynamic.
• Colonialism and conquest were ways to generate wealth that were distinguishable from technological improvement, though the military and technological domains have always been tightly correlated. The discovery of fresh natural resources, like a new oil field, can also expand wealth. But we can no longer count on forms of wealth expansion outside of technological innovation. The low-hanging fruit have been plucked. Only extreme inventiveness can expand wealth now.
• If you want to know what’s really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty. If content is worthless, then people will start to become empty-headed and contentless.
• Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.
• The time has come to ask, “Are we building the digital utopia for people or machines?”
• The United States still has top universities and corporate labs, so we’d like the world to continue to accept intellectual property laws that send money our way based on our ideas, even when those ideas are acted on by others. We’d like to indefinitely run the world’s search engines, computing clouds, advertising placement services, and social networks, even as our old friend/demon Moore’s law makes it possible for new competitors to suddenly appear with ever greater speed and thrift.
• There are so many layers of abstraction between the new kind of elite investor and actual events on the ground that the investor no longer has any concept of what is actually being done as a result of investments.
• According to the new ideology, which is a blending of cyber-cloud faith and neo-Milton Friedman economics, the market will not only do what’s best, it will do better the less people understand it.
• Even if a robot that maintains your health will only cost a penny in some advanced future, how will you earn that penny? Manual labor will be unpaid, since cheap robots will do it.
• Perceptions of fairness and social norms can support or undermine any economic idea.
• First-order expression is when someone presents a whole, a work that integrates its own worldview and aesthetic. It is something genuinely new in the world. Second-order expression is made of fragmentary reactions to first-order expression.
• At the time that the web was born, in the early 1990s, a popular trope was that a new generation of teenagers, reared in the conservative Reagan years, had turned out exceptionally bland. The members of “Generation X” were characterized as blank and inert. The anthropologist Steve Barnett compared them to pattern exhaustion, a phenomena in which a culture runs out of variations of traditional designs in their pottery and becomes less creative.
• whole point of connected media technologies was that we were supposed to come up with new, amazing cultural expression. No, more than that—we were supposed to invent better fundamental types of expression: not just movies, but interactive virtual worlds; not just games, but simulations with moral and aesthetic profundity.
• Computers can take your ideas and throw them back at you in a more rigid form, forcing you to live within that rigidity unless you resist with significant force.
• The convenience factor is real, but part of the reason is that Wikipedia provides search engines with a way to be lazy.
• It is awkward to study neuroscience, for instance, if you assume that the brain is linked to some other entity—a soul—on a spirit plane. You have to treat the brain simply as a mechanism you don’t understand if you are to improve your understanding of it through experiment.
• A smell is a synecdoche: a part standing in for the whole.
• If we had infinite brains, capable of using an infinite number of words, those words would mean nothing, because each one would have too specific a usage. Our early hominid ancestors were spared from that problem, but with the coming of the internet, we are in danger of encountering it now. Or, more precisely, we are in danger of pretending with such intensity that we are encountering it that it might as well be true.
• In the future, I fully expect children to turn into molecules and triangles in order to learn about them with a somatic, “gut” feeling.

La Bella Lingua: My Love Affair with Italian, the World’s Most Enchanting Language by Dianne Hales

★★★★★ (5/5)

A selection of my favourite passages from the book

• “Learning a new language is like growing a new head,” a European friend told me long ago. “You see with new eyes, hear with new ears, speak with a new tongue.” Neuroimaging has proved her right: the mental gymnastics of groping for even the simplest words in a different language ignites brand-new clusters of neurons and synapses.
• In grammar workshops with its native-born teachers, I paddled through Italian’s treacherous tenses, trying to navigate the confounding conditional and the slippery subjunctive. With even greater effort I struggled to corral its impish pronouns, which flit from the front to the back of sentences, disappear entirely, or latch on to verbs like fleas to a cat’s ear.
• At Camponeschi, our favorite restaurant in Rome, the waiters giggled when they overheard me describe the wonderful view from our apartment terrace of the roofs of Rome. Instead of the masculine tetti (roofs, pronounced tet-tee), I had used the feminine slang tette (tits, pronounced tet-tay).
• Best of all, I have realized how right the British author E. M. Forster was when he urged visitors to drop “that awful tourist idea that Italy’s only a museum of antiquities and art.” “Love and understand the Italians,” he urged, “for the people are more marvelous than the land.” Indeed they are— and I have had the good fortune both to love and understand some of them and to be loved and understood in return.
• As a country Italy makes no sense. Think of it: a spiny peninsula stretching from snowcapped Alps to sun baked islands, spattered with stone villages bound by ancient allegiances, a mosaic of dialects, cuisines, and cultures united into a nation barely a century and a half ago. Metternich dismissed it as a “geographic expression.” Too long to be a nation, sniffed Napoleon. Possible to govern, growled Mussolini, but useless to try. The real Italy resides somewhere beyond blood or borders in what President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi has called “la nostra prima patria” (“ our first fatherland”)— its language.
• While other tongues do little more than speak, this lyrical language thrills the ear, beguiles the mind, captivates the heart, enraptures the soul, and comes closer than any other idiom to expressing the essence of what it means to be human.
• With only an estimated 60 to 63 million native speakers (compared to a whopping 1.8 billion who claim at least a little English), Italian barely eclipses Urdu, Pakistan’s official language, for nineteenth place as a spoken tongue. Yet Italian ranks fourth among the world’s most studied languages— after English, Spanish, and French. In the United States, Italian has become the fastest-growing language taught in colleges and universities.
• This trend mystifies many. When I mentioned my Italian studies to a venture capitalist in San Francisco, he asked if I could have chosen a less practical language. I might have cited Urdu, but I saw his point.
• A color becomes more than a hue in Italian. A giallo (yellow) refers to a mystery— in life, literature, or movies— because thrillers traditionally had yellow covers. A Telefono Azzurro (blue telephone) is a hotline for abused children; a settimana bianca (white week), a ski holiday in winter; and a matrimonio in bianco (white wedding), an unconsummated and ostensibly unhappy marriage.
• Prince Charming always appears as Principe azzurro (the blue prince). Viola (purple) triggers so much apprehension that the wife of the Italian consul in San Francisco stopped our interview to ask me to switch to a different pen. Italians, she explained, associate purple with Lent, when drapes of that color shroud church statues. For many centuries, theaters closed during this penitential season so actors and singers lost their jobs and incomes. Because of their misfortune, unlucky purple became a color to avoid.
• A sign outside a rustic osteria (a tavern serving simple food) summarized its entire menu in three variations on a single word: pranzo (lunch)— fifteen euro; pranzetto (lighter lunch)— ten euro; pranzettino (bite to eat)— five euro.
• Take, for instance, Tommaseo’s entry on Italy’s national pastime (past and present): flirting, which translates into fare la civetta, or “make like an owl.” Only Italian distinguishes between a civettino, a precocious boy flattering a pretty woman; a civettone, a boorish lout doing the same; a civettina, an innocent coquette; and a civettuola, a brazen hussy. A giovanotto di prima barba (a boy who starts flirting even before growing a beard) may turn out to be a damerino (dandy), a zerbino (doormat), a zerbinetto (lady-killer), or a zerbinotto (a fop too old for such foolishness). If he becomes a cicisbeo, he joins a long line of Italian men who flagrantly courted married women.
• Vento (wind) melts into venticello (a nice little breeze); caldo (hot) snuggles into calduccio (nice and warm).
• A tiny tail at the end of the word transforms the coarse culo into culetto (a sweet little baby bottom) or culoni (big butts), a popular nickname for Americans.
• Suffixes such as -astro, -ucolo, or -accio also spell trouble. No one wants to hire an avvocatuccio (small-time lawyer), read the works of a poetucolo (untalented poet), wear a cappellaccio (ugly hat), or drive on a stradaccia (bad road).
• A very good person, someone we might praise in English as the salt of the earth, becomes un pezzo di pane (a piece of bread) in Italian. Rather than having heart or guts, a brave Italian has fegato (liver), while a man in gamba (literally “on a leg”) is on top of his game. In Italian, it’s a compliment to be praised for your nose (naso), for intuition; hand (mano), for artistry; or testicles (coglioni), for being, well, ballsy.
• In literary Italian (though not daily conversation) memories of times past can be summoned up in three words and ways— rammentare (with the mind, for facts), ricordare (with the heart, for feelings), and rimembrare (with the body, for physical sensations).
• “To remain like Father Falcuccio,” another Romanesco idiom, refers to a hypothetical priest who, having lost his clothes, had to cover his naked private parts with “one hand in front and another one behind.” A Roman ends up in this hapless predicament when, for instance, he wrecks his car before paying off the loan or his wife finds him with his mistress and both women dump him.
• The manhole covers of Rome are still emblazoned with S.P.Q.R., the Latin abbreviation for the Senatus Populusque Romani, the senate and people of Rome. (Italians joke that it really stands for Sono pazzi questi romani— These Romans are crazy.)
• Then as now an unabashed earthiness permeates both Italy’s language and culture. To ward off bad luck or malocchio (the evil eye), for instance, men long ago developed the habit of touching their genitals when, say, discussing a serious illness or passing a cemetery. The phrase “Io mi tocco” (“ I touch myself”) remains as common as “Knock on wood” in English, but the actual act, committed in public by a forty-two-year-old man from Como, recently led the Italian supreme court to ban such “potentially offensive” behavior. The judges advised superstitious men to delay reaching for their crotches until within the privacy of their homes.
• The amused vendor explained that the name of America’s windy city sounds like “ci (pronunced chee) cago” (“ I poop here”).
• Italians began adding a second distinguishing label or surname (called a patronymic) to their names, sometimes with the prefix di to mean “son of” or da for a town of origin, as in Leonardo da Vinci.
• Occupations inspired names such as Tagliabue for “ox-cutter” or “butcher” and Botticelli for “barrel maker”
• Others acquired names inspired by their appearance (Basso for “short,” Rosso for “redhead”), or personality (Benamato for “well loved”; Bentaccordi for “congenial;” Benedetto for “blessed;” Bonmarito for “good husband”).
• Hungry for adventure, Francesco joined Assisi’s military to fight neighboring Perugia. After being captured by enemy troops, he spent nearly a year in prison before his father ransomed him. This traumatic experience, followed by a serious illness, changed Francesco.
• The condemned men en route to these otherworldly destinations walked along the Via dei Malcontenti (Street of the Discontented) accompanied by hooded members of the Compagnia dei Neri (Company of the Blacks), through the Porta alla Giustizia (Gate of Justice) to the scaffold.
• In his Divine Comedy, Dante achieved his goal. This linguistic alchemist spun Italy’s lusty, lively, long-maligned vulgar tongue into literary gold: a gleaming new language second to none in its power and profundity.
• I were to study Italian more, I would speak it better.” “Se io studiassi di più l’italiano, lo parlerei meglio.”
  
  
• Their “low-style” dispute typifies a tenzone, an Italian literary contest in which two writers alternate insults, a tradition that began in the Middle Ages and continues to this day.
• In the last canto, Dante struggles to convey the inexpressible nature of God. He chooses the literary metaphor of a book bringing together all forms of knowledge, truth, and beauty scattered like loose pages throughout the universe.
• In another famous canto, Dante describes Ulysses rallying his men to journey beyond what seemed the utmost limit of human voyaging by reminding them of their noble origins: “You were not formed to live like beasts.” Mussolini appropriated this phrase—fatti non foste a viver come bruti— in his bombastic exhortations to restore the glory that was Rome.
• a man in need of riches,” she decides, “than riches in need of a man.”
• these sparkle with such earthy vitality that Italian coined the word boccaccesco to describe a spicy story.
• Faccia is what you wash in the morning. Viso appears in cosmetic ads and expressions such as far buon viso a cattiva sorte (to smile in the face of adversity). I didn’t grasp the proper use of volto until
• I saw my friend Ludovica Sebregondi’s elegant art book, Volti di Cristo (Faces of Christ), a limited-edition, five-thousand-euro oversized volume with artistic reproductions so precious that readers are advised to wear gloves when turning the pages. No wonder Italians chuckled when I asked if I had a sbaffo sul mio volto (smudge on my visage).
• Lorenzo elevated carnascialismo, carnival merriment, almost to the point of art. “If ever history could be happy, it was then,” wrote one commentator.
• My teachers had predicted that someday this milestone of a moment would come, that I would start thinking, reacting, even dreaming in Italian. I didn’t believe them. Yet here, in the cradle of the language, in the shadow of Italy’s tre corone, I crossed some invisible membrane into a world that at once was entirely familiar yet completely new. Springing to life in my brain, Italian had traveled to my fingertips and set them a flight.
• The Cinquecento also saw the invention of the enthusiastic exclamation point, dubbed un punto affettuoso, an affectionate period, by an editor of the time.
• Down through the centuries conquerors stole much of what Italians created. Emperors and kings routinely packed up paintings, sculptures, and jewels— a practice that continued into the twentieth century, when the Nazis filled railroad cars with pieces of Italian art. The one treasure no one could loot from Italians was their language, which La Crusca had elevated to a living art.
• Emperor Charles V, who once declared, “I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.”
• In La Serenissima’s glittering heyday, correspondents signed letters, “Il Suo schiavo” (“ your slave”). Meeting on the street, acquaintances would bow and repeat the same ingratiating words
• However, in the Venetian dialect, which softens the hard sound of sch (pronounced sk in other regions) to a chewy sh (as in “show”), Suo schiavo came out sciao, which melted into ciao as it migrated to other parts of Italy.
• Castiglione won me over with a single word he created to describe the essence of courtly behavior: sprezzatura, the studied carelessness that “conceals art and presents everything said and done as something brought about without laboriousness and almost without giving it any thought.” The closest English comes is “nonchalance,”
• Surely anyone who’s ever dined at a rib joint on dollar night would recognize the voracious eaters Della Casa describes as “totally oblivious, like pigs with their snouts in the swill, never raising their faces nor their eyes, let alone their hands, from the food in front of them.”
• and directs men to remove black socks when otherwise nude and not to put their feet on a table as if they were a Texas oilman ( petroliere texano).
• Troppo bello, meno buono. Too much of the beautiful and less of the good, some of my Italian friends say cynically. But I relish the flourishes of bella figura, each an opportunity to transform minor interactions into memorable interludes.
• “Ah, signora, you are learning the Italian secret!” he exclaims. “And what is that?” “Our greatest art: the art of living.”
• A thousand years ago Italian— or, more precisely, the Florentine dialect of the time— had no words for “art” or “artist.” Arte meant “guild,” a collective of specialists in a certain field. (The greater “arts” were judges and notaries, cloth weaving, exchange, wool, silk, physicians and apothecaries, and furriers. The lesser “arts” included butchers, shoemakers, carpenters, innkeepers, bakers, and so on.)
• The painter Paolo Uccello (1397– 1475), for example, became so engrossed by studies of perspective that he often would refuse his wife’s requests to join her in their bedchamber so he could linger with what he called his “odd mistress.”
• Attila, one of Verdi’s lesser works, included a line that stirred millions of patriotic souls: “You may have the universe if I may have Italy.”
• Verdi brought a new quality to opera: ruvidezza, a roughness, a pounding, a grinding, an underground rumbling that produced a visceral effect aptly called furore. I think of it as the musical equivalent of Michelangelo’s terribilità.
• Italians have long realized that we are, quite literally, what we eat. Sapia, Latin for “taste,” gave rise to Italian’s sapienza (wisdom).
• Italians deftly describe a busybody who noses into everything as prezzemolo (parsley), someone uptight as a baccalà (dried cod), a silly fool as a salame (salami), and a bore as a pizza or a mozzarella. Gotten yourself into a mess? You’ve made an omelet (fatto una frittata). Fed up and can’t take any more? You’re at the fruit ( alla frutta). Have a crush on someone? You’re cooked (cotto). Italians dismiss a story told time and again as fritta e rifritta (fried and refried), a worthless or banal movie as a polpettone (large meatball), and something that’s all sizzle and no steak as tutto fumo e niente arrosto (all smoke and no roast).
• Anche l’occhio vuole la sua parte (the eye too wants its part). In Italy food must be bello as well as buono.
• But as we mixed a salad together one day, Maria-Augusta did share an old Italian axiom for flavoring a salad perfectly: find un prodigo (a spendthrift) to pour the oil, un avaro (miser) to add the vinegar, un saggio (a wise man) to add the salt, and un pazzo (a crazy man) to mix them all together.
• Italian proverbs testify to the national antipathy to a table for one: “Chi mangia solo crepa solo” (“ Who eats alone dies alone”). “Chi non mangia in compagnia è un ladro o una spia” (“ Who doesn’t eat with a companion is a thief or a spy”). “Chi mangia solo si strozza a ogni mollica” (“ Who eats alone chokes on every bite”).
• The word minestra became synonymous with survival and a metaphor for what one does to get by in life. If you have the means to act as you wish, you can have any minestra you want, including a minestrone, or big hearty soup. If not, you have to settle for minestra riscaldata, the same old reheated fare. When you have used all your options, mangia la minestra o salta dalla finestra— eat the soup or jump out the window.
• La morale della favola (the moral of the story): Sometimes it’s better to eat like a king than to be one.
• “To know a territory, you need to eat it,” the great Italian writer Italo Calvino once wrote. Keep this in mind the next time you twirl capellini around your fork, bite into a piping hot pizza, or savor a dish of steaming risotto. That’s not just food you’re eating. It’s Italy.
• In English a heart breaks just like a dish, but a lovesick Italian soul claims a word of its own— spezzare— when it shatters into bits.
• dissected the linguistic nuances that differentiate affetto, affezione, amore, amorevolezza, benevolenza, inclinazione, passione, amicizia, amistanza, amistà, carità, tenerezza, cordialità, svisceratezza, ardore, and ardenza.
• Ovid and nicknamed the Nose, is best known for his collection of classical myths in the Metamorphoses and his scandalous Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), a primer on flirting and seduction that included advice on how to pick up women at a race or gladiator bout: “Press your thigh against the woman sitting next to you,” he suggested. “If by chance a speck of dust falls in the girl’s lap, as it may, let it be flicked away by your fingers, and if there’s nothing, flick away the nothing: let anything be a reason for you to serve her.”
• Ovid’s advice to women: Arrive late. “Delay enhances charm; delay’s a great bard,” he noted. “Plain you may be, but at night you’ll look fine to the tipsy. Soft lights and shadows will mask your faults.”
  
  
  
• Manzoni’s characters’ names pop up regularly in contemporary conversations as shorthand for certain Italian types. For a while, I thought all of my friends had the same priest, the pliable Don Abbondio, as their pastor and that unscrupulous politicians happened to be named Rodrigo. No name may better suit a spewer of bureacratic gobbledygook than that of the corrupt lawyer, Azzeccagarbugli, a combination of the words for “guessing” and “confusion.”
• That’s not all they learned. Cinema, with its lifelike immediacy and visceral impact, did for modern Italians what Dante had for his countrymen in the fourteenth century: It created a new way of hearing, speaking, seeing, thinking, and imagining life in this world and beyond. Movies— no less than Italy’s great works of literature, art, manners, music, and cuisine— taught Italians how to be Italian.
• The glittering Venice Film Festival debuted in 1934 as a showcase for the Italian film industry. In 1937, on April 21, the mythical anniversary of the founding of Rome, Mussolini inaugurated Cinecittà (Cinema City), Rome’s equivalent of Hollywood’s expansive studio back lots.
• Movie titles also were translated into Italian: High Noon became Mezzogiorno di fuoco (Midday of Fire) and Gone with the Wind, Via col vento (Away with the Wind). In Italy, as everywhere else, Scarlett’s (Rossella in Italian) motto, “Domani è un altro giorno,” became a catchphrase of the day.
• The people’s favorites were bubbly fantasies known as telefoni bianchi (white telephone) films that presented a glamorous fantasy world so rich and rarified that even telephones made a style statement.
• “There are two shortcuts to speaking the language,” one of my early teachers told me. “You can take an Italian lover, or you can watch Italian movies.”
• These experiences, Fellini said, taught him that making movies was “the medium of expression most congenial… to my laziness, my ignorance, my curiosity about life, my inquisitiveness, my desire to see everything and to be independent, my lack of discipline, and my capacity for real sacrifice.”
• I’ve heard Italians use it as an expression of surprise (cazzo!), praise (cazzuto), boredom (scazzo), anger (incazzato), approximation (a cazzo), or plain and simple contempt (cazzone). “Col cazzo che ci vado!” translates as, “The hell I’ll go!;” “Che cazzo vuoi?” as “What the f*** do you want?”
• a guy can be a big disgusting shit (stronzone), a small charming one (stronzino or stronzettino), a shit with something going for him (stronzetto), a disagreeable shit (stronzaccio), or a bad but irresistible shit (stronzuccio). A filthy place, in case you ever find yourself in one in Italy, is a stronzaio.
• St. Thomas Aquinas (1225– 1274), hailed as “the titan of theology,” declared that la bestemmia was graver than homicide because it sprang from the intention to attack the goodness and generosity (bontà) of God himself, whereas insults took from a man the honor due him and the respect that meant as much as house and home.
• cafone can mutate into the son of an ignorant bumpkin (figlio d’un cafone), a crude slob (cafone rozzo), a tasteless boob (cafone sciocco), an ill-mannered fool (cafone maleducato), an officious ass (cafone impertinente), a tasteless jerk (cafone senza gusto), or a disgusting boor (cafone ripugnante).
• In The Tongues of Italy , the linguist Ernst Pulgram observes that the Romans and their descendants “thrice ruled the Western world in three different domains of human endeavor: once in government and law, once in religion, and once in art.” To this trio of triumphs, he added a fourth— in language.
• Under Fascism an Italian chauffeur became an autista; soccer turned into calcio; a bar was rechristened qui si beve (here one drinks).
• Ragazzo may be the proper Italian word for child, but a “kid” remains a bimbo in Florence, a citano in Siena, a puteo in Venice, a figgeu in Savona (Liguria), a burdel or burdlin in Romagna, a frut in Friuli, and a quatraro in some southern dialects
• Even Italians get confused by what some call the “Englishing” of their language. When a beauty salon dubbed itself “Top one,” Italians read the name as topone, or big rat, and didn’t venture inside.
• Some words that sound English actually have Italian roots. “Snob” may date back to Renaissance Florence, when the burgeoning middle class sought acceptance in the upper strata of local society. To distinguish between the true noble families and the nouveau riche, census-takers wrote s.nob (senza nobiltà, for “without nobility”) next to the names of social climbers (known in contemporary Italian as arrampicatori sociali).
• spazzamento, a good sweeping; spazzatina, a dusting; spazzola, a brush; and spazzolino da denti, a toothbrush.
• Despite such egregious excesses, I have no fears for the fate of a language that has survived invasions, ruthless inquisitors, foreign tyrants, strutting dictators, corrupt politicians, the European Union, ubiquitous English, and tourist hordes from around the world. Italian was born of an insatiable hunger to express, communicate, and connect. Nothing and no one can quench this urge.

La Bella Figura by Beppe Severgnini

★★★★☆ (4/5)

A selection of my favorite passages

• Being Italian is a full-time job. We never forget who we are, and we have fun confusing anyone who is looking on.
• Your Italy and our Italia are not the same thing. Italy is a soft drug peddled in predictable packages, such as hills in the sunset, olive groves, lemon trees, white wine, and raven-haired girls. Italia, on the other hand, is a maze. It’s alluring, but complicated. In Italia, you can go round and round in circles for years.
• It’s the kind of place that can have you fuming and then purring in the space of a hundred meters, or the course of ten minutes. Italy is the only workshop in the world that can turn out both Botticellis and Berlusconis.
• Authority has been making Italians uneasy for centuries, so we have developed an arsenal of countermeasures, from flattery to indifference, familiarity, complicity, apparent hostility, and feigned admiration.
• We judge books by their covers, politicians by their smiles, professionals by their offices, secretaries by their posture, table lamps by their design, cars by their styling, and people by their title. It’s no coincidence that one Italian in four is president of something.
• we like nice gestures so much we prefer them to good behavior. Gestures gratify, but behaving takes an effort. Still, the sum of ten good deeds does not make a person good, just as ten sins do not necessarily add up to a sinner. Theologians distinguish between actum and habitus: a single incident is not as serious as a “habit,” or “practice.”
• We think it’s an insult to our intelligence to comply with a regulation. Obedience is boring. We want to think about it. We want to decide whether a particular law applies to our specific case. In that place, at that time.
• people know what to choose and what to avoid. If they choose the wrong starter, it’s because they want to be able to complain later. In its own way that, too, is a touch of sophistication.
• If we want to save the Italian way of eating, we have to focus on pride and distrust, qualities we have in abundance.
• Take Samuel Johnson, for example. He said, “A man who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority.”
• People want to look inside a table lamp, touch a suitcase, listen to an explanation, sniff a carpet, or sneak an olive and talk about the flavor. That’s one reason why e-commerce hasn’t taken off in Italy. There are some things you can’t do on the Web. Italians are sensitive, curious, and diffident. We don’t even like goods in sealed packages. We wonder what the cellophane is trying to hide from us.
• If we had Scottish weather in Italy, there would have been several revolutions. Instead, we lodged the occasional protest, made a lot of promises, and talked.
• The family is a bank. Loans for first homes almost invariably come from parents. There are no formalities, no interest, and quite often no obligation to repay the capital.
• The Italian family is an employment agency. One Italian in three admits to finding a job through relatives.
• The Italian family is a market where nothing is sold, lots of stuff is given away, and everything is haggled over.
• The family is an infirmary. It’s the place where flu-blighted Italian males crawl for shelter, glowering like wounded animals.
• The “strange multitude of little things necessary” that consoled Robinson Crusoe can also be found in an Italian bedroom. It’s the same blend of found and brought objects, with the same striving for self-sufficiency.
• An apartment, noted the French writer Julien Green in the 1960s, is a forest with clearings, quiet rooms, then “zones of horror” and “crossroads of fear.”
• As you know, social sensuality is nonexistent in the U.S. Over there, modesty is the official norm and pornography is an industry, but little light is shed on the vast space in between.
• Stations disclose an interesting Italy. There is a stratification of habits and memories that the Italian railway company has decided not to disturb. Efficiency has suffered, but the atmosphere has benefited enormously.
• Do you know why members of Parliament never agree but “register a substantial identity of opinion”? Or why it never rains on the weather forecast but “some precipitation is foreseen following an intensification of cloud cover”? It’s because verbal complexity is a form of protection (“ I was misunderstood”), a decoration (“ See how well educated I am?”), and a declaration of belonging (“ I am a member of the caste of doctors, weather forecasters, or lawyers, and I’m sorry but that’s how we talk”).
• When an Italian laugh arrives, it comes from the belly. A British laugh descends from the brain. An American guffaw comes from the heart and emerges from the mouth. A German laugh starts in the belly and stays there.
• We have learned to appreciate Italy’s national genius in an export format, particularly when it coincides with an event, a special occasion, or a moment we will be able to talk about.
• Television in Italy is as exotic as an airport, as unruly as a city street, as hypnotic as a hotel, as perturbing as a store, as ever-changing as a restaurant, as noisy as a train, as deceiving as the countryside, as instructive as a piazza, and as ubiquitous as churches. But if the churches are emptying, television holds on to its faithful. Fifty years ago, people talked about the television of the people. Nowadays, we are the people of the television.
• He understood that millions of Italians dream of doing a bit of sinning, repenting sincerely, and then starting all over again. “Guys,” he said, “I’ve got just what you’re looking for.”
• until now Italy has avoided certain social divides, despite our limits and lazinesses. We don’t have endemic alcoholism, or epidemics of teenage pregnancies. There are no sports for the poor and sports for the rich, or working-class schools and middle-class schools. Italy is an unruly nation, but uniform in its unruliness.
• That’s Italy’s signature shape, the profile of old scooters, young breasts, bread on the table, and the classic Lancia Appia automobile.
• computer shopping robs us of the tactile pleasures of choosing and purchasing. Physical perceptions are also part of the Catholic liturgy, in which the senses support the spirit. In fact, you could say that e-commerce is a Protestant invention— sensible, but unsatisfying.
• The social piazza is appreciated by residents, who look to it for routine and reassurance. Out-of-towners also use it as a point of reference. Look how people sit in an Italian piazza: on benches, steps, bicycles, motorbikes, walls, railings, curbstones, and chairs in cafés. We watch life drift by from these theater boxes. Every generation renews its subscription, after first swearing it won’t.
• The idea that Italians are ungovernable has always appealed to those who don’t want to govern us. The myth that Italy is past redemption suits a lot of people. It saves them the bother of redeeming us. Remember that the inevitability of lawlessness is a falsehood.
• In the rest of Europe, people tend to stand in straight lines. Here we favor more artistic configurations, such as waves, parabolas, herringbone patterns, hordes, groups, and clusters. Our choreography complicates waiting, but brightens our lives.
• The Finns own proportionately more cell phones than we do. They’d be very happy to use them all the time, but they don’t know who to call. We Italians know only too well.
• The second reason we do not like to talk about money is that we are afraid someone might be listening. We fear fate, which should not be tempted. We fear others, who should not be provoked. And we fear the tax authorities, especially when we declare ridiculously low incomes. So, when we talk about money, the same golden rule holds true: speak softly, deal in cash, and err on the side of caution.
• We Italians like to decide when the general rule is applicable to our specific case. The same is true for taxes. We are our own tax authorities, and almost always magnanimously decide not to collect.
• your status in the company is proportionate to your ability to avoid meetings.
• The nation that, according to journalist Leo Longanesi, wanted to rebel against authority with a permit from the police has grown up but not changed. Few want to take all-or-nothing risks.
• For more than half a century, one lira was a theoretical concept. To amount to anything, the lira had to be in a group, like sardines or schoolgirls. The monetary unit we do miss is a nice round number, the million.
• Outside schools, bars, and restaurants, the sidewalk is the appointed venue for intalliamento, the practice of hanging out while you decide what to do, reflect on life, nibble a snack, and observe the world. This form of hanging out is a fascinating Italian habit. Many foreigners mistake it for indecision, but it’s actually a preliminary. It’s the anticipation of pleasure, and demands a certain skill.
• I’m talking about the Potential Driver, who has found a parking space— improbable, improvised, or just plain impermissible— and has no intention of giving it up.
• This sort of abstruse lucubration is exclusively Italian. People think like that in Milan, too, but in Naples the reasoning has an esoteric dimension. Though I don’t believe it, there’s an urban legend that says when the pedestrian lines fade away they aren’t repainted: they might encourage someone’s suicidal presumption that you can step off the sidewalk without looking. Where there aren’t any lines, things are left up to the sharpness of the pedestrian’s eye and the generosity of the motorist’s heart.
• Comments on Prague are equally interesting. It’s a city that Italians go wild over, even if no one can explain why. What comes out is a mixed salad of romance and literature in which Kafka is the tomato but no one knows the names of the greens.
• If an Englishman’s home is his castle, an Italian’s garden is his Eden, a place of privilege and temptation. There are no serpents, but there are neighbors.
• In a small town, we don’t just want a congenial barber and a well-stocked newsstand. We want professionally made coffee and a proper pizza. We want a couple of streets to stroll down, an avenue to jog along, a pool to swim in, and a cinema for a bit of entertainment. We want a functioning courthouse, a reassuring hospital, a consoling church, and an unintimidating cemetery We want a new university and an old theater house. We want soccer fields, and city councilors we can pester in the bar. We want to see the mountains beyond the grade crossing when the weather’s good and the air is clear. We want footsteps on cobbled streets in the night, yellow lights to tinge the mist, and bell towers we can recognize from a distance. We want doctors and lawyers who can translate abstract concepts into our dialect— my father can— and people with a kind word and a smile for everyone.
• We Italians continue to argue over the fascism we had, the communism we nearly had, the terrorism we tasted, and the corruption we tolerated. Our digestive process is extremely slow, and induces chronic headaches.
• In millions of Italians, there exists— sorry, there resists— an astonishing acceptance of obscurity from authority of any kind, be it political, judicial, administrative, medical, or academic.
• But Italy is disconcerting even in its defects. Just as you are about to write the country off as shallow, it reveals unsuspected depths. And when you look into the depths, the surface becomes a mirror.
• In fact, school is a perfect thumbnail sketch of the way we are. It is an example of brilliant imperfection, with peaks of excellence and abysses of inefficiency.
• Ours is a bonsai nationalism born in school corridors like this one. It shuffles between the desks, steps shyly through the schoolbooks, slides through the identical class registers, and emerges in a party dressed up as an ordeal, the maturità. From then on, our patriotism survives on private means and memories.
• Italians are a moral people, but our morality, like our law, has to be tailored to fit. We have an à la carte approach. Everyone selects what he or she wants, according to conscience and convenience. Religion is still fundamental, but the menu is long, and the dishes varied.
• Pleasures compensate for oppression, and help to bear it.
• Our sun is setting in installments. It’s festive and flamboyant, but it’s still a sunset. Many non-Italians are surprised that such a dazzling nation should seem so tired and cynical.
• Italy’s good qualities are the inimitable product of centuries of history. Its failings are the annoying consequence of civic idleness. That’s why you added that Italy is the kind of place that can have you fuming and then purring in the space of a hundred meters, or the course of ten minutes.
• You explained, and we agreed, that intelligence is overused to the point of exasperation in Italy. You don’t just want to decide “what kind of red” a stoplight is. If it lasts a second or two longer than expected, people think it’s out of order and go through it anyway.

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

A selection of my favorite passages

• A man would die to-night of lying out on the marshes, I thought. And then I looked at the stars, and considered how awful it would be for a man to turn his face up to them as he froze to death, and see no help or pity in all the glittering multitude.
• It is not possible to know how far the influence of any amiable honest-hearted duty-doing man flies out into the world; but it is very possible to know how it has touched one’s self in going by, and I know right well that any good that intermixed itself with my apprenticeship came of plain contented Joe, and not of restlessly aspiring discontented me.
• Pursuing my idea as I leaned back in my wooden chair, and looked at Biddy sewing away with her head on one side, I began to think her rather an extraordinary girl. For I called to mind now, that she was equally accomplished in the terms of our trade, and the names of our different sorts of work, and our various tools. In short, whatever I knew, Biddy knew. Theoretically, she was already as good a blacksmith as I, or better.
• I sat silent, recalling what a drudge she had been until Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt successfully overcame that bad habit of living, so highly desirable to be got rid of by some people. I recalled the hopeless circumstances by which she had been surrounded in the miserable little shop and the miserable little noisy evening school, with that miserable old bundle of incompetence always to be dragged and shouldered. I reflected that even in those untoward times there must have been latent in Biddy what was now developing, for, in my first uneasiness and discontent I had turned to her for help, as a matter of course.
• He presently stood at the door immediately beneath me, smoking his pipe, and Biddy stood there too, quietly talking to him, and I knew that they talked of me, for I heard my name mentioned in an endearing tone by both of them more than once. I would not have listened for more, if I could have heard more; so I drew away from the window, and sat down in my one chair by the bedside, feeling it very sorrowful and strange that this first night of my bright fortunes should be the loneliest I had ever known.
• Morning made a considerable difference in my general prospect of Life, and brightened it so much that it scarcely seemed the same. What lay heaviest on my mind was, the consideration that six days intervened between me and the day of departure; for I could not divest myself of a misgiving that something might happen to London in the meanwhile, and that, when I got there, it would be either greatly deteriorated or clean gone.
• Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried than before,—more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle. If I had cried before, I should have had Joe with me then.
• He knew more of my intended career than I knew myself, for he referred to his having been told by Mr. Jaggers that I was not designed for any profession, and that I should be well enough educated for my destiny if I could “hold my own” with the average of young men in prosperous circumstances. I acquiesced, of course, knowing nothing to the contrary.
• These people hated me with the hatred of cupidity and disappointment. As a matter of course, they fawned upon me in my prosperity with the basest meanness.
• So, throughout life, our worst weaknesses and meannesses are usually committed for the sake of the people whom we most despise.
• What I suffered from, was the incompatibility between his cold presence and my feelings towards Estella. It was not that I knew I could never bear to speak to him about her, that I knew I could never bear to hear him creak his boots at her, that I knew I could never bear to see him wash his hands of her; it was, that my admiration should be within a foot or two of him,—it was, that my feelings should be in the same place with him,—that, was the agonizing circumstance.
• She was even more dreadfully fond of Estella than she had been when I last saw them together; I repeat the word advisedly, for there was something positively dreadful in the energy of her looks and embraces. She hung upon Estella’s beauty, hung upon her words, hung upon her gestures, and sat mumbling her own trembling fingers while she looked at her, as though she were devouring the beautiful creature she had reared.
• “Out of my thoughts! You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read since I first came here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since,—on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with. The stones of which the strongest London buildings are made are not more real, or more impossible to be displaced by your hands, than your presence and influence have been to me, there and everywhere, and will be. Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil. But, in this separation, I associate you only with the good; and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you must have done me far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp distress I may. O God bless you, God forgive you!”
• When at last I dozed, in sheer exhaustion of mind and body, it became a vast shadowy verb which I had to conjugate. Imperative mood, present tense: Do not thou go home, let him not go home, let us not go home, do not ye or you go home, let not them go home. Then potentially: I may not and I cannot go home; and I might not, could not, would not, and should not go home; until I felt that I was going distracted, and rolled over on the pillow, and looked at the staring rounds upon the wall again.
• I knew not how to answer, or how to comfort her. That she had done a grievous thing in taking an impressionable child to mould into the form that her wild resentment, spurned affection, and wounded pride found vengeance in, I knew full well. But that, in shutting out the light of day, she had shut out infinitely more; that, in seclusion, she had secluded herself from a thousand natural and healing influences; that, her mind, brooding solitary, had grown diseased, as all minds do and must and will that reverse the appointed order of their Maker, I knew equally well. And could I look upon her without compassion, seeing her punishment in the ruin she was, in her profound unfitness for this earth on which she was placed, in the vanity of sorrow which had become a master mania, like the vanity of penitence, the vanity of remorse, the vanity of unworthiness, and other monstrous vanities that have been curses in this world?
• “My dear Biddy, I have forgotten nothing in my life that ever had a foremost place there, and little that ever had any place there. But that poor dream, as I once used to call it, has all gone by, Biddy,—all gone by!”

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein

★★★★★ (5/5)

A selection of my favourite passages from the book

On Man and Machine

• Somewhere along evolutionary chain from macromolecule to human brain self-awareness crept in. Psychologists assert it happens automatically whenever a brain acquires certain very high number of associational paths. Can’t see it matters whether paths are protein or platinum.
• “You thinking of issuing more trick cheques? Don’t.” “Not?” “Very not. Mike, you want to discuss nature of humor. Are two types of jokes. One sort goes on being funny forever. Other sort is funny once. Second time it’s dull. This joke is second sort. Use it once, you’re a wit. Use twice, you’re a halfwit.”
• I tried to explain. How Mike knew almost every book in Luna, could read at least a thousand times as fast as we could and never forget anything unless he chose to erase, how he could reason with perfect logic, or make shrewd guesses from insufficient data. . . and yet not know anything about how to be “alive.”
• Wish she had asked him before we gave our opinions; that electronic juvenile delinquent always agreed with her, disagreed with me. Were those Mike’s honest opinions?
• I suspect Prof enjoyed being rebel long before he worked out his political philosophy, while Mike— how could human freedom matter to him? Revolution was a game— a game that gave him companionship and chance to show off talents. Mike was as conceited a machine as you are ever likely to meet.
• His voice when he first woke was blurred and harsh, hardly understandable. Now it was clear and choice of words and phrasing was consistent— colloquial to me, scholarly to Prof, gallant to Wyoh, variation one expects of mature adults. But background was dead. Thick silence.
• I used to question Mike’s endless reading of fiction, wondering what notions he was getting. But turned out he got a better feeling for human life from stories than he had been able to garner from facts; fiction gave him a gestalt of life, one taken for granted by a human; he lives it. Besides this “humanizing” effect, Mike’s substitute for experience, he got ideas from “not-true data” as he called fiction. How to hide a catapult he got from Edgar Allan Poe.

On Governance and Politics

• So wardens didn’t fret about protest meetings. “Let ‘em yap” was policy. Yapping had same significance as squeals of kittens in a box. Oh, some wardens listened and other wardens tried to suppress it but added up same either way— null program.
• “Even more lovely,” he said, “than I remembered!” She smiled, over her mad. “’ Thanks, Professor. But don’t bother. Nobody here but comrades.” “Señorita, the day I let politics interfere with my appreciation of beauty, that day I retire from politics. But you are gracious.”
• “May I suggest a change in program? Manuel, the life of a conspirator is not an easy one and I learned before you were born not to mix provender and politics. Disturbs the gastric enzymes and leads to ulcers, the occupational disease of the underground.”
• A rational anarchist believes that concepts such as ‘state’ and ‘society’ and ‘government’ have no existence save as physically exemplified in the acts of self-responsible individuals. He believes that it is impossible to shift blame, share blame, distribute blame. . . as blame, guilt, responsibility are matters taking place inside human beings singly and nowhere else. But being rational, he knows that not all individuals hold his evaluations, so he tries to live perfectly in an imperfect world. . . aware that his effort will be less than perfect yet undismayed by self-knowledge of self-failure.
• In term of morals there is no such thing as ‘state.’ Just men. Individuals. Each responsible for his own acts.
• An earthworm expects to find a law, a printed law, for every circumstance. Even have laws for private matters such as contracts. Really, if a man’s word isn’t any good, who would contract with him? Doesn’t he have reputation?
• More than six people cannot agree on anything, three is better— and one is perfect for a job that one can do. This is why parliamentary bodies all through history, when they accomplished anything, owed it to a few strong men who dominated the rest.
• “But one thing must be made clear. Earth’s major satellite, the Moon, is by nature’s law forever the joint property of all the peoples of Earth. It does not belong to that handful who by accident of history happen to live there. The sacred trust laid upon the Lunar Authority is and forever must be the supreme law of Earth’s Moon.”
• why do British still have Queen?–and boast of being “sovereign.” “Sovereign,” like “love,” means anything you want it to mean; it’s a word in dictionary between “sober” and “sozzled.”
• Is mixed-up place another way; they care about skin color— by making point of how they don’t care. First trip I was always too light or too dark, and somehow blamed either way, or was always being expected to take stand on things I have no opinions on.
• Think I prefer a place as openly racist as India, where if you aren’t Hindu, you’re nobody— except that Parsees look down on Hindus and vice versa. However I never really had to cope with North America’s reverse-racism
• You have put your finger on the dilemma of all government— and the reason I am an anarchist. The power to tax, once conceded, has no limits; it contains until it destroys.
• It may not be possible to do away with government— sometimes I think that government is an inescapable disease of human beings. But it may be possible to keep it small and starved and inoffensive— and can you think of a better way than by requiring the governors themselves to pay the costs of their antisocial hobby?”

On Revolutions

• Wyoming dear lady, revolutions are not won by enlisting the masses. Revolution is a science only a few are competent to practice. It depends on correct organization and, above all, on communications. Then, at the proper moment in history, they strike. Correctly organized and properly timed it is a bloodless coup. Done clumsily or prematurely and the result is civil war, mob violence, purges, terror. I hope you will forgive me if I say that, up to now, it has been done clumsily.”
• Organization must be no larger than necessary— never recruit anyone merely because he wants to join. Nor seek to persuade for the pleasure of having another share your views. He’ll share them when the times comes. . . or you’ve misjudged the moment in history. Oh, there will be an educational organization but it must be separate; agitprop is no part of basic structure.
• As to basic structure, a revolution starts as a conspiracy therefore structure is small, secret, and organized as to minimize damage by betrayal— since there always are betrayals. One solution is the cell system and so far nothing better has been invented.
• Revolution is an art that I pursue rather than a goal I expect to achieve. Nor is this a source of dismay; a lost cause can be as spiritually satisfying as a victory.
• The thing to do with a spy is to let him breathe, encyst him with loyal comrades, and feed him harmless information to please his employers. These creatures will be taken into our organization. Don’t be shocked; they will be in very special cells. ‘Cages’ is a better word. But it would be the greatest waste to eliminate them— not only would each spy be replaced with someone new but also killing these traitors would tell the Warden that we have penetrated his secrets.
• Prof claimed that communications to enemy were essential to any war if was to be fought and settled sensibly.
• Here we were, in control too soon, nothing ready and a thousand things to do. Authority in Luna was gone— but Lunar Authority Earthside and Federated Nations behind it were very much alive. Had they landed one troopship, orbited one cruiser, anytime next week or two, could have taken Luna back cheap. We were a mob.
• Distrust the obvious, suspect the traditional . . . for in the past mankind has not done well when saddling itself with governments.

On Freedom

• But I will accept any rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.
• Was reminding her that anything free costs twice as much in long run or turns out worthless.
• A managed democracy is a wonderful thing, Manuel, for the managers…and its greatest strength is a ‘free press’ when ‘free’ is defined as ‘responsible’ and the managers define what is ‘irresponsible.’
• Comrade Members, like fire and fusion, government is a dangerous servant and a terrible master. You now have freedom— if you can keep it. But do remember that you can lose this freedom more quickly to yourselves than to any other tyrant. Move slowly, be hesitant, puzzle out the consequences of every word.

World Building

• Even p-suits used to be fetched up from Terra— until a smart Chinee before I was born figured how to make “monkey copies” better and simpler. (Could dump two Chinee down in one of our maria and they would get rich selling rocks to each other while raising twelve kids. Then a Hindu would sell retail stuff he got from them wholesale— below cost at fat profit. We got along.)
• Nothing frustrates a man so much as not letting him get in his say. With luck and help from Warden, Chief Engineer would have ulcers by Christmas.
• Then didn’t know whether I felt lucky or not. Only excuse I could see for a Family talk-talk was fact that I was due to be shipped Earthside next day, labeled as grain. Could Mum be thinking of trying to set Family against it? Nobody had to abide by results of a talk-talk. But one always did. That was strength of our marriage: When came down to issues, we stood together.

Wise Gems to Ponder Upon

• Terror! A man can face known danger. But the unknown frightens him. We disposed of those finks, teeth and toenails, to strike terror into their mates.
• May I ask this? Under what circumstances is it moral for a group to do that which is not moral for a member of that group to do alone?
• Thing that got me was not her list of things she hated, since she was obviously crazy as a Cyborg, but fact that always somebody agreed with her prohibitions. Must be a yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please. Rules, laws— always for other fellow. A murky part of us, something we had before we came down out of trees, and failed to shuck when we stood up.
• Too many facts hamper a diplomat, especially an honest one.
• Since they can inflict their will on us, our only chance lies in weakening their will. That was why we had to go to Terra. To be divisive. To create many opinions. The shrewdest of the great generals in China’s history once said that perfection in war lay in so sapping the opponent’s will that he surrenders without fighting.
• If we used our last strength to destroy a major city, they would not punish us; they would destroy us. As Prof put it, “If possible, leave room for your enemy to become your friend.”
• Manuel, when faced with a problem you do not understand, do any part of it you do understand, then look at it again.

Beautifully Constructed Sentences

• “It’s never too late for grief. I’ve grieved every instant since you told me. But I locked it in the back of my mind for the Cause leaves no time for grief. ”
• Women are amazing creatures— sweet, soft, gentle, and far more savage than we are.
• It was a fifteen-minute cast but that was essence: Go back to work, be patient, give us time.
• and I finally got it through my confused head that was being done with breakneck speed because of my date to break my neck next day.
• besides, if those last minutes were going to be my very last, I decided to experience them. Bad as they would be, they were my very own and I would not give them up.
• never heard word “venereal” until first went Earthside and had thought “common cold” was state of ice miner’s feet.
• No, my dear Colonel, we won’t shoot the cow…but we would, if forced to, let the cow know that it could be shot.
• Was a mob, not a battle. Or maybe a battle is always that way, confusion and noise and nobody really knowing what’s going on.
• Tried not to think about it, just as had been forced not to think too much about Ludmilla. Little Milla hadn’t carried a picnic lunch. She hadn’t been a sightseer looking for thrills.