How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.

France is a nation devoted to the false hypothesis on which it then builds marvelously logical structures.

The hatred Americans have for their own government is pathological, if understandable. At one level it is simply thwarted greed: since our religion is making a buck, giving a part of that buck to any government is an act against nature.

Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.

I suspect that our own faith in psychiatry will seem as touchingly quaint to the future as our grandparents' belief in phrenology seems now to us.

I believe it's my pastoral duty to convert friends to atheism.

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.