Perverse Games

The relations between rhetoric and ethics are disturbing: the ease with which language can be twisted is worrisome, and the fact that our minds accept these perverse games so docilely is no less cause for concern.

-- Octavio Paz Lozano (1914 - 1998), poet, writer, diplomat, and winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Mexican writer to become a Nobel Laureate, El mono gramatico (The Monkey Grammarian), ch. 4 (1974)