We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.

To associate with other like-minded people in small, purposeful groups is for the great majority of men and women a source of profound psychological satisfaction. Exclusiveness will add to the pleasure of being several, but at one; and secrecy will intensify it almost to ecstasy.

Men make use of their illnesses at least as much as they are made use of by them.

Experience is not a matter of having actually swum the Hellespont, or danced with the dervishes, or slept in a doss-house. It is a matter of sensibility and intuition, of seeing, and hearing the significant thing, of paying attention at the right moments, of understanding and coordinating. Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.

The thin and precarious crust of decency is all that separates any civilization, however impressive, from the hell of anarchy or systematic tyranny which lie in wait beneath the surface .

Every ceiling, when reached, becomes a floor, upon which one walks as a matter of course and prescriptive right

Nothing — the only perfection, the only absolute. Infinite and eternal nothing.