Everyone tries to create a world he can live in, and what he can't use he often can't see. But the real world is already created, and if your fabrication doesn't correspond, then even if you feel noble and insist on there being something better than what people call reality, that better something needn't try to exceed what, in its actuality, since we know it so little, may be very surprising. If a happy state of things, surprising; if miserable or tragic, no worse than what we invent.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

Excuse me ... but I reject your definitions of me.

How could I be anything but a dissenter? Who wants the opinion of a group?

No realistic, sane person goes around Chicago without protection.

The terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows. As I know mine. As all know. For that is the truth of it — that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know.

I'm glad I haven't lived in vain.