I have met with some of them - very honest fellows, who, with all their stupidity, had a kind of intelligence and an upright good sense, which cannot be the characteristics of fools.

By recollecting the pleasures I have had formerly, I renew them, I enjoy them a second time, while I laugh at the remembrance of troubles now past, and which I no longer feel.

You will be amused when you see that I have more than once deceived without the slightest qualm of conscience, both knaves and fools.

In fact, to gull a fool seems to me an exploit worthy of a witty man.

If you think about the traditional mafia stories we grew up on, it is always about the death of criminal organisations - things like the 'Sopranos' - the last vestiges of once proud families subsumed by the modern era.

Violence in the voice is often only the death rattle of reason in the throat.

Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death.

The elegy does the work of mourning; it allows us to experience mortality. It turns loss into remembrance, and it delivers an inheritance.