He thought of how the world organizes its affairs so that civilization every day commits crimes for which any individual would be imprisoned for life. And how people accept this either by ignoring it and calling it current affairs or politics or war.
When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.
Institutions that had proved the very basis of our society (the family, the neighbourhood, marriage) cracked and split apart in the face of a new shrill current of desperate selfishness.
Everyone works for every one else. We can't do without any one.
If he had been alone in the world it would have been easy to ignore the trial, though it was also certain that in that case the trial would never have come about.
I am now quite cured of seeking pleasure in society, be it country or town. A sensible man ought to find sufficient company in himself.
They had clearly feared turn-of-the-century irrationality—religious overzealousness on one side, destructive hedonism on the other, with both heated by ideological intolerance and corporate greed.
For our part, if we had to choose between the barbarians of civilization and those civilized upholders of barbarism, we would choose the former.