“The street is no longer measured by meters but by corpses ... Stalingrad is no longer a town. By day it is an enormous cloud of burning, blinding smoke; it is a vast furnace lit by the reflection of the flames. And when night arrives, one of those scorching howling bleeding nights, the dogs plunge into the Volga and swim desperately to gain the other bank. The nights of Stalingrad are a terror for them. Animals flee this hell; the hardest stones cannot bear it for long; only men endure.”

“Amoz Oz, who said something of the same kind, but from a different perspective: ‘People like you’, he said to me, ‘are going to become very disappointed in Israel in the years ahead. You want it to behave like a European society. Instead, it is becoming a Middle Eastern society. I hope that it will not behave worse than other Middle Eastern societies. But you should not delude yourself that it is likely to behave much better.”

“In Soviet thinking the concept of economy of force has little place. Whereas to an Englishman the taking of a sledgehammer to crack a nut is a wrong decision and a sign of mental immaturity...in Russian eyes the cracking of nuts is clearly what sledgehammers are for.”

“There are fun nights, there are crazy nights, and then there are those nights that make men legends.”

“Because the brain models our sense of self as just another instance of a thing, it is easy for us to project qualities that we only know of from our own minds into other objects. This allows us to imagine intelligence in a rock, a tree, an animal or even a politician.”

“Sooner or later, however, we must realise there is no station in this life, no one earthly place to arrive once and for all. The journey is the joy. The station is an illusion - it constantly outdistances us. Yesterday belongs to a history, tomorrow belongs to God. Yesterday's a fading sunset, tomorrow's a faint sunrise. Only today is there light enough to love and live.”

“Night is a time of terror. Worries and anxieties are unleashed by the darkness, when the distractions and the busyness of the day can no longer keep them at bay." Killing Lincoln by Bill O'Reilly”