Love of country is what I do not feel when I am wronged, but what I felt when secure in my rights as a citizen.... the true lover of his country is not he who consents to lose it unjustly rather than attack it, but he who longs for it so much that he will go all lengths to recover it.

Alcibiades, as quoted by Thucydides, (The History of the Peloponnesian War)

In a dying civilization, political prestige is the reward not of the shrewdest diagnostician, but of the man with the best bedside manner.

Eric Ambler, A Coffin for Dimitrios

Life [has become] that strange experience in which you're zooming along a freeway and suddenly realize that you haven't paid any attention to driving for the last fifteen minutes, yet you're still alive and didn't crash.

Douglas Coupland, as quoted by Pico Iyer in "The McLuhan Galaxy", New York Review of Books (May 26, 2011)

Any life that ends in exile cannot have been totally mediocre.

Quoted by Simon Leys in the New York Review of December 20, 2008