If You Want To Be Your Own

All Ideas Advanced To Deal With The Florentine Noise Problem, The Florentine Traffic Problem, Are Utopian, And Nobody Believes In Them, Just As Nobody Believed In Machiavelli's Prince, A Utopian Image Of The Ideally Self-interested Despot.

Labor Is Work That Leaves No Trace Behind It When It Is Finished, Or If It Does, As In The Case Of The Tilled Field, This Product Of Human Activity Requires Still More Labor, Incessant, Tireless Labor, To Maintain Its Identity As A 'work' Of Man.

Yet Friendship, I Believe, Is Essential To Intellectuals. It Is Probably The Growth Hormone The Mind Requires As It Begins Its Activity Of Producing And Exchanging Ideas. You Can Date The Evolving Life Of A Mind, Like The Age Of A Tree, By The Rings Of Friendship Formed By The Expanding Central Trunk. In The Course Of My History, Not Love Or Marriage So Much As Friendship Has Promoted Growth.

A Politician Or Political Thinker Who Calls Himself A Political Realist Is Usually Boasting That He Sees Politics, So To Speak, In The Raw; He Is Generally A Proclaimed Cynic And Pessimist Who Makes It His Business To Look Behind Words And Fine Speeches For The Motive. This Motive Is Always Low.

I Suppose Everyone Continues To Be Interested In The Quest For The Self, But What You Feel When You're Older, I Think, Is That - How To Express This - You Really Must Make The Self.