I suppose that every age has its own particular fantasy: ours is science. A seventeenth-century man like Blaise Pascal, who thought himself a mathematician and scientist of genius, found it quite ridiculous that anyone should suppose that rational processes could lead to any ultimate conclusions about life, but easily accepted the authority of the Scriptures. With us, it is the other way `round

The only people I've met in this world who never doubt are materialists and atheists.

The price you pay for being powerful and being rich is to be hated.

It is only possible to succeed at second-rate pursuits - like becoming a millionaire or a prime minister, winning a war, seducing beautiful women, flying through the stratosphere, or landing on the moon. First-rate pursuits - involving, as they must, trying to understand what life is about and trying to convey that understanding - inevitably result in a sense of failure. A Napoleon, a Churchill, or a Roosevelt can feel himself to be successful, but never a Socrates, a Pascal, or a Blake. Understanding is forever unattainable.

The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact.

An orgy looks particularly alluring seen through the mists of righteous indignation.

Civilization - a heap of rubble scavenged by scrawny English Lit. vultures.