There are only two mantras, yum and yuck, mine is yum.

There're many ways, my dear, to victimize people. The most insidious way is to persuade them that they're victims.

It is more important to be free than to be happy.

Me? I stand for uncertainty, insecurity, bad taste, fun, and things that go boom in the night.

Individualism is bad for business - though absolutely necessary for freedom, progressive knowledge, and any possible interface with the transcendent.

Modern Romans insisted that there was only one god, a notion that struck Alobar as comically simplistic. Worse, this Semitic deity was reputed to be jealous (what was there to be jealous of if there were no other gods?), vindictive, and altogether foul-tempered. If you didn't serve the nasty fellow, the Romans would burn your house down. If you did serve him, you were called a Christian and got to burn other people's houses down.

The author isn't altogether certain that there is any such thing as exaggeration. Our brains permit us to use such a wee fraction of their resources that, in a sense, everything we experience is a reduction. We employ drugs, yoga techniques and poetics - and a thousand more clumsy methods - in an effort just to bring things back up to normal.