People With Bad Consciences Always Fear The

... In America ... Children Are Instructed In The Virtues Of The System They Live Under, As Though History Had Achieved A Happy Ending In American Civics.

The Things Of This World Reveal Their Essential Absurdity When They Are Put In The Venetian Context. In The Unreal Realm Of The Canals, As In A Swiftian Lilliput, The Real World, With Its Contrivances, Appears As A Vast Folly.

Every Age Has A Keyhole To Which Its Eye Is Pasted. Spicy Court-memoirs, The Lives Of Gallant Ladies, Recollections Of An Ex-nun, A Monk's Confession, An Atheist's Repentance, True-to-life Accounts Of Prostitution And Bastardy Gave Our Ancestors A Penny Peep Into The Forbidden Room.

Congress-these, For The Most Part, Illiterate Hacks Whose Fancy Vests Are Spotted With Gravy, And Whose Speeches, Hypocritical, Unctuous, And Slovenly, Are Spotted Also With The Gravy Of Political Patronage.

All Ideas Advanced To Deal With The Florentine Noise Problem, The Florentine Traffic Problem, Are Utopian, And Nobody Believes In Them, Just As Nobody Believed In Machiavelli's Prince, A Utopian Image Of The Ideally Self-interested Despot.