The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom.

We have long become overgrown with calluses; we no longer hear people being killed. ("X")

Life itself today has lost its plane reality: it is projected, not along the old fixed points, but along the dynamic coordinates of Einstein, of revolution. In this new projection, the best-known formulas and objects become displaced, fantastic, familiar-unfamiliar. This is why it is so logical for literature today to be drawn to the fantastic plot, or to an amalgam of reality and fantasy.

Heretics are the only bitter remedy against the entropy of human thought.

The microspeed of the tongue ought to be always slightly less than the microspeed of the thoughts and certainly not ever the reverse.

Along the blade of a knife lies the path of paradox—the single most worthy path of the fearless mind . . . .

To the feudal aristocracy and the aristocracy of the spirit, nobility derives from diametrically opposite sources. The glory of the feudal aristocrat is in being a link in the longest possible chain of ancestors. The glory of the aristocrat of the spirit is in having no ancestors - or having as few as possible. If an artist is his own ancestor, if he has only descendents, he enters history as a genius; if he has few ancestors, or is related to them distantly, he enters history as a talent.