My activism really is for myself, because I see places in the world where I feel I should be. If there is something really bad, really evil, happening somewhere, then that is where I should be. I need, for myself, to feel that I have stood there. It feels a lot better than just watching it on television.
Free speech carries with it the evil of all foolish, unpleasant venomous things that are said but, on the whole, we would rather lump them than do away with them.
We can never lose what is really ours. Who can lose his being? Who can lose his very existence? If I am good, it is the existence first, and then that becomes colored with the quality of goodness. If I am evil, it is the existence first, and that becomes colored with the quality of badness. That existence is first, last, and always; it is never lost but ever present.
In the real world in which we live, you always have to choose between evils. And in choosing between evils, you have to have moral criteria for how to make those choices.
But at sixteen the conscience rarely gnaws So much, as when we call our old debts in At sixty years, and draw the accounts of evil, And find a deuced balance with the devil.