they had come to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes.

For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?

I felt as if I was the only person awake in a city of sleepwalkers. That's an illusion, of course. When you walk through a crowd of strangers it's next door to impossible not to imagine that they're all waxworks, but probably they're thinking just the same about you.

The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

Politics is the choice between the lesser of two evils.

There are some situations from which one can only escape by acting like a devil or a lunatic.

He would say that God had given him a tail to keep the flies off, but that he would sooner have had no tail and no flies.