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1 " It is truth, in the old saying, that is 'the daughter of time,' and the lapse of half a century has not left us many of our illusions. Churchill tried and failed to preserve one empire. He failed to preserve his own empire, but succeeded in aggrandizing two much larger ones. He seems to have used crisis after crisis as an excuse to extend his own power. His petulant refusal to relinquish the leadership was the despair of postwar British Conservatives; in my opinion this refusal had to do with his yearning to accomplish something that 'history' had so far denied him—the winning of a democratic election. "
― Christopher Hitchens , Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays
2 " Depression can seem absurdly self aggrandizing to those who do not experience it, But that does not make it any less painful to those who do. "
― Richard Brookhiser
3 " In life,” he said, “there are no essentially major or minor characters. To that extent, all fiction and biography, and most historiography, are a lie. Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story. Hamlet could be told from Polonius’s point of view and called The Tragedy of Polonius, Lord Chamberlain of Denmark. He didn’t think he was a minor character in anything, I daresay. Or suppose you’re an usher in a wedding. From the groom’s viewpoint he’s the major character; the others play supporting parts, even the bride. From your viewpoint, though, the wedding is a minor episode in the very interesting history of your life, and the bridge and groom both are minor figures. What you’ve done is choose to play the part of a minor character: it can be pleasant for you to pretend to be less important you know you are, as Odysseus does when he disguises as a swineherd. And every member of the congregation at the wedding sees himself as the major character, condescending to witness the spectacle. So in this sense fiction isn’t a lie at all, but a true representation of the distortion that everyone makes of life. “Now, not only are we the heroes of our own life stories–we’re the ones who conceive the story, and give other people the essences of minor characters. But since no man’s life story as a rule is ever one story with a coherent plot, we’re always reconceiving just the sort of hero we are, and consequently just the sort of minor roles that other people are supposed to play. This is generally true. If any man displays almost the same character day in and day out, all day long, it’s either because he has no imagination, like an actor who can play only one role, or because he has an imagination so comprehensive that he sees each particular situation of his life as an episode in some grand over-all plot, and can so distort the situations that the same type of hero can deal with them all. But this is most unusual. “This kind of role-assigning is myth-making, and when it’s done consciously or unconsciously for the purpose of aggrandizing or protecting your ego–and it’s probably done for this purpose all the time–it becomes Mythotherapy. Here’s the point: an immobility such as you experienced that time in Penn Station is possible only to a person who for some reason or other has ceased to participate in Mythotherapy. At that time on the bench you were neither a major nor a minor character: you were no character at all. It’s because this has happened once that it’s necessary for me to explain to you something that comes quite naturally to everyone else. It’s like teaching a paralytic how to walk again. "
― John Barth
4 " By aggrandizing one's own abilities and achievements, the grandiose person remains out of touch with who they truly are and as such, remains prone to crossing the boundaries of others. "
― Steven Franssen , Make Self-Knowledge Great Again