Number 205 of Pascal’s scraps contains this famous cry: “When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant and which know me not, I am frightened and astonished at being here rather than there;...Learn More

From David Horowitz, Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Passion Introduction: A Universal Aspiration All the totalitarian movements of modernity have been inspired by the same fantasy of a world made right and finally brought into harmony with itself. This utopian delusion is not restricted to aspiring commissars or religious fanatics. In one...Learn More

Mohammed Atta, the leader of the 9/11 attacks, was a withdrawn and ineffectual man who died without achieving his worldly ambitions. He never realized his goal of becoming an architect or urban planner, never married or had a family. Apart from his jihad, Mohammed Atta never made a mark in life. But in death he was a god, bringing judgment to 3,000...Learn More

As my own death approaches, I weigh the life I have lived against what it might have been. I ask myself: Could I have been wiser, could I have done more? When I look at my life this way from the end, I can take satisfaction that I mostly gave it my all and did what I could. Perhaps I might have achieved greater heights; certainly I could have spent...Learn More

From Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Passion “Whenever we think about social change,” Alinsky writes, “the question of means and ends arises. The man of action views the issue of means and ends in pragmatic and strategic terms. He has no other problem.” In other words, like Trotsky, Alinsky’s radical is not going to worry about the legality...Learn More

The Book of Psalms says that all flesh is grass and that each of us is like a flower in the field that flourishes and dies: “The wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more.” Our feeling that we have a place in the world is a deception we practice on ourselves, because we have none. It is this pretense that makes an...Learn More

All my life wherever I have been, in whatever places I have found myself, I have felt like an outsider. And who hasn’t? Every home is temporary and we are only transients. But I was not prepared for the irony I encountered now, that even as a patient in a cancer ward I would feel myself an outsider too. I looked at the women in their kerchiefs and...Learn More

From The End of Time Going Home 2 Because he was unable to get what he wanted in this life, my father frittered away his days in dreams of the next. The metaphor of this longing was the sea, limitless and unattainable. What my father desperately wanted – or so he believed -- was a world better than the one he had been given. This was the...Learn More

Before the hour of his jihad, on the very page where he had copied the summons to love death, Mohammed Atta acknowledged that it was a call to perform acts unnatural to men. “Everybody hates death, fears death,” he wrote, but then explained why men should love it nonetheless. “Only the believers who know the life after death and the reward after...Learn More

From Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Passion Alinksy dedicates his signature work, Rules for Radcials, to the devil, the first rebel: “Lest we forget, an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins -- or which is...Learn More

From The End of Time Going Home 3 Our origins create a gravity that controls our ends but also leaves us to our own devices. In every family there is one who has gone this way, while another heads somewhere else. This one surrenders to awful circumstances; that one survives the worst and flourishes. One benefits from benign conditions; another...Learn More

The End of Time 1. Going Home When he was alive and I was still young, my father told me his version of the Fall. “We begin to die the day we are born,” he said. What I think my father meant by this was that the cells, which are the invisible elements of our being, are constantly churning in nature’s cycle. Silently, without our being aware of...Learn More