Be a man!... What good is religion if it collapses under calamity? Think of what earthquakes and floods, wars and volcanoes, have done before to men! Did you think that God had exempted [us]? He is not an insurance agent.

The Social Contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie to and humbug themselves for the general Good. Lies are the mortar that bind the savage individual man into the social masonry.

Crime and bad lives are the measure of a State's failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community.

There is no remorse like the remorse of Chess

[A novel by Henry James] is like a church lit but without a congregation to distract you, with every light and line focused on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverently place, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an egg-shell, a bit of string.

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

When the history of civilization is written, it will be a biological history and Margaret Sanger will be its heroine.