Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.

Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.

Indifference to all the refinements of life--it's really shocking. Just Calvinism, that's all. Calvinism without the excuse of Calvin's theology.

"Consider the matter dispassionately, Mr. Foster, and you will see that no offence is so heinous as unorthodoxy of behaviour. Murder kills only the individual- and after all, wha is an individual? ". . . ." We can make a new one with the greatest of ease- as many as we like. Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual; it strikes at Society itself."

I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms for example.

As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends correspondingly to increase. And the dictator will do well to encourage that freedom...it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate.