“Kat, Hale groaned, then fell back onto the pillows. Funny, I didn t hear a doorbell. I let myself in; hope that s okay. Hale smiled. Or the alarm. She stepped inside, tossed a pocket-size bag of tools onto the bed. You re due for an upgrade. Hale propped himself against the antique headboard and squinted up at her. She returns. He crossed his arms across his bare chest. You know, I could be naked in here.”
“God will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of heaven as a shortcut to the nearest chemist s shop.”
“There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol. ... There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality. ... But they used to take morphia and cocaine. ... Two thousand pharmacologists and biochemists were subsidized in A.F. 178. ... Six years later it was being produced commercially. The perfect drug. ... Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant. ... All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects. ... Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology. ... Stability was practically assured.”
“A revolution is not a bed of roses. A revolution is a struggle between the future and the past.”
“(When asked what he thought of Western civilization): I think it would be a good idea.”
“Nessuno è più schiavo di colui che si ritiene libero senza esserlo”
“Human relationships always help us to carry on because they always presuppose further developments, a future - and also because we live as if our only task was precisely to have relationships with other people.”
“People who live in society have learnt how to see themselves, in mirrors, as they appear to their friends. I have no friends: is that why my flesh is so naked?”
“No one asks how or what I am doing. They could not care less. We’re all looking glasses, we girls, existing only to reflect their images back to them as they’d like to be seen. Hollow vessels of girls to be rinsed of our own ambitions, wants, and opinions, just waiting to be filled with the cool, tepid water of gracious compliance. A fissure forms in the vessel. I’m cracking open.”
“The ink of the scholar is more holy than the blood of the martyr.”
“The limited circle is pure.”
“That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.”
“Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.”
“It’s ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They’re totalitarian institutions - you take orders from above and maybe give them to people below you. There’s about as much freedom as under Stalinism.”
“Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to be on the alert to point out its faults, and do better than it would have them?”
“We seldom realize, for example, that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society. We copy emotional reactions from our parents, learning from them thatexcrement is supposed to have a disgusting smell and that vomiting is supposed to be an unpleasant sensation. The dread of death is also learned from their anxieties about sickness and from their attitudes to funerals and corpses. Our social environment has this power just because we do not exist apart from a society. Society is our extended mind and body. Yet the very society from which the individual is inseparable is using its whole irresistible force to persuade the individual that he is indeed separate! Society as we now know it is therefore playing a game with self-contradictory rules.”
“We all live inside the terrible engine of authority, and it grinds and shrieks and burns so that no one will say: lines on maps are silly.”