There is nothing an addict likes more, or that serves as better pretext for continuing his present way of life, than to place the weight of responsibility for his situation somewhere other than on his own decisions.

If the history of the 20th Century proved anything, it proved that however bad things were, human ingenuity could usually find a way to make them worse.

Where a reputation for intolerance is more feared than a reputation for vice itself, all manner of evil may be expected to flourish.

The need always to lie and always to avoid the truth stripped everyone of what Custine called 'the two greatest gifts of God-the soul and the speech which communicates it.' People became hypocritical, cunning, mistrustful, cynical, silent, cruel, and indifferent to the fate of others as a result of the destruction of their own souls.

There is something deeply attractive, at least to quite a lot of people, about squalor, misery, and vice. They are regarded as more authentic, and certainly more exciting, than cleanliness, happiness, and virtue.

When every benefit received is a right, there is no place for good manners, let alone for gratitude.

The idea that freedom is merely the ability to act upon one's whims is surely very thin and hardly begins to capture the complexities of human existence; a man whose appetite is his law strikes us not as liberated but enslaved.