An unrectified case of injustice has a terrible way of lingering, restlessly, in the social atmosphere like an unfinished equation.

Anybody who has ever tried to rectify an injustice or set a record straight comes to feel that he is going mad.

Leisure was the sine qua non of the full Renaissance. The feudal nobility, having lost its martial function, sought diversion all over Europe in cultivated pastimes: sonneteering, the lute, games and acrostics, travel, gentlemanly studies and sports, hunting and hawking, treated as arts.

Life for the European is a career; for the American, it is a hazard.

Modern neurosis began with the discoveries of Copernicus. Science made man feel small by showing him that the earth was not the center of the universe.

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.

It is impossible, except for theologians, to conceive of a world-wide scandal or a universe-wide scandal; the proof of this is the way people have settled down to living with nuclear fission, radiation poisoning, hydrogen bombs, satellites, and space rockets.

Others are to us like the "characters" in fiction, eternal and incorrigible; the surprises they give us turn out in the end to have been predictable- unexpected variations on the theme of being themselves.

Like Michelangelo and Cellini, Florentines of every station are absorbed in acquiring real estate: a little apartment that can be rented to foreigners; a farm that will supply the owner with oil, wine, fruit, and flowers for the house.

For self-realization, a rebel demands a strong authority, a worthy opponent, God to his Lucifer.