Ironically enough, the only people who can hold up indefinitely under the stress of modern war are psychotics. Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity.

The natural rhythm of human life is routine punctuated by orgies.

Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence - those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.

Did you eat something that didn't agree with you?" asked Bernard. The Savage nodded "I ate civilization.

There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it.

One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.

Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.