The trouble with fiction," said John Rivers, "is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.

Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons - that's philosophy.

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

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.

What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when anthrax bombs are popping all around you?

A whole population of strangers inhabited and shaped that little body, lived in that mind and controlled its wishes, dictated its thoughts...The name was an abstraction, a title arbitrarily given, like "France" or "England," to a collection, never long the same, of many individuals who were born, lived, and died within him, as the inhabitants of a country appear and disappear, but keep alive in their passage the identity of the nation to which they belong.

Under the present dispensation, the great majority of factories are little despotisms, benevolent in some cases, malevolent in others. Even where benevolence prevails, passive obedience is demanded by the workers, who are ruled by overseers, not of their own election, but appointed from above. In theory they may be the subjects of a democratic state; but in practice they spend the whole of their working lives as the subjects of a petty tyrant.