My soul bleeds and the blood steadily, silently, disturbingly slowly, swallows me whole.

My friend, the truth is always implausible, did you know that? To make the truth more plausible, it's absolutely necessary to mix a bit of falsehood with it. People have always done so.

Nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom. –The Grand Inquisitor

A man would still do something out of sheer perversity - he would create destruction and chaos - just to gain his point...and if all this could in turn be analyzed and prevented by predicting that it would occur, then man would deliberately go mad to prove his point.

It's a burden to us even to be human beings-men with our own real body and blood; we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalized man.

Civilization merely develops man's capacity for a greater variety of sensations, and ... absolutely nothing else.

If he has a conscience he will suffer for his mistake. That will be his punishment-as well as the prison.