It was because it meant nothing and you never expected anyone who mattered to read it that you were free to say unconsciously truthful things.

And people who would do anything for power can’t believe that the IF, with more power than anybody, might really refrain from using it.

He recognized that his impulse to be boastful was the result of fear—no one knew him here, and so he wanted to assert his abilities as a means of winning respect.

No sentence that begins, “You Americans,” is going to end productively.

Think what it means to take a test in a class. They say they’re giving us problems that we’re supposed to solve. But that’s never true, is it? Because they give us problems to which the solutions are already known. That’s why they’re able to give us grades. So all you do in classroom tests is solve problems that have already been solved.

Do I have honor?

I do if I want it. All I have to do is keep my word.

No, I have to mean my promises when I make them. When I say I’ll do something, I mean to do it, and then I do it. That’s honor. Not to give your word unless you can keep it, unless you intend to keep it. To be the kind of person who, when they say they’ll do a thing, the other people can go about their business because that job is as good as done.