Although images of perfection in people's personal lives can cause unhappiness images of perfect societies - utopian images - can cause monstrous evil. In fact forcefully changing society to conform to societal images was the greatest cause of evil in the twentieth century.
A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power but a few great hearts are not enough to make us worthy of using it.
The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.
What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.
Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it.
The government for example has determined that black people (somehow) have fewer abilities than white people and so must be given certain preferences. Anyone acquainted with both black and white people knows this assessment is not only absurd but monstrous. And yet it is the law.
Within the U.S. the Obama presidency will be mainly measured by the success or failure of his economic policies. And here I fear the monstrous stimulus package with which this administration stumbled out of the gate will prove to be Obama's Waterloo.
The monsters of our childhood do not fade away neither are they ever wholly monstrous. But neither in my experience do we ever reach a plane of detachment regarding our parents however wise and old we may become. To pretend otherwise is to cheat.
The architect Peter Arens who is the monstrous carbuncle architect not merely did his design which had won a public competition never get built but his practice suffered financially for some years.
Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction.