“Sacrifice is theultimate truth,he said. But truth itselfmust be sacrificed . . .”

“Truth often sacrificed for the sake of stability and peace.”

“The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life.”

“Truth, as he always said, was overrated, nobody ever won prizes for telling the truth.”

“Tereza's mother never stopped reminding her that being a mother meant sacrificing everything. Her words had the ring of truth, backed as they were by the experience of a woman who had lost everything because of her child. Tereza would listen and believe that being a mother was the highest value in life and that being a mother was a great sacrifice. If a mother was Sacrifice personified, then a daughter was Guilt, with no possibility of redress.”

“Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed.”