Political Despair in 1939
A.J. Ayer:
The political situation makes me more and more depressed. I resent above all the feeling of impotence from which one suffers at times like these, the feeling that really everything one values is at the mercy of knaves and fools.
Ayer’s letter to Otto Neurath, quoted in Ben Rogers’s A.J. Ayer: A Life, p. 160