Lully's machine, Mill's fear and Lasswitz's chaotic library can be the subject of jokes, but they exaggerate a propensity which is common: making metaphysics and the arts into a kind of play with combinations.

I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left...

Democracy is an abuse of statistics.

The future is as irrevocable as an inflexible yesterday.

It's a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA.

I confess that I have not cleared a path through all seven hundred pages, I confess to having examined only bits and pieces, and yet I know what it is, with that bold and legitimate certainty with which we assert our knowledge of a city, without ever having been rewarded with the intimacy of all the many streets it includes.

To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.