If human beings were shown what they're really like, they'd either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.

It isn’t only art that is incompatible with happiness, it’s also science. Science is dangerous, we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.

Addiction is an increasing desire for an act that gives less and less satisfaction

A man may have strong humanitarian and democratic principles, but if he happens to have been brought up as a bath-taking, shirt-changing lover of fresh air, he will have to overcome certain physical repugnance before he can bring himself to put those principles into practice.

In all activities of life, the secret of efficiency lies in an ability to combine two seemingly incompatible states: a state of maximum activity and a state of maximum relaxation.