Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman.

A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.

In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.

Where beauty is worshipped for beauty's sake as a goddess, independent of and superior to morality and philosophy, the most horrible putrefaction is apt to set in. The lives of the aesthetes are the far from edifying commentary on the religion of beauty.

No Romeo-and-Juliet acts, no nonsense about Love with a large L, none of that popular song claptrap with its skies of blue, dreams come true, heaven with you. Just sensuality for its own sake.

Religion is always a patron of the arts, but its taste is by no means impeccable.

The best way to find things out is not to ask questions at all. If you fire off a question, it is like firing off a gun - bang it goes