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"...in every intoxication was some kind of price. Otherwise, nothing divine to economy"

'So they slouched in alone into the automatic vending machine room, deposited their dimes and quarters with all the small libidinal benefits which accrue from small insertions, and rose thoughtfully in the elevator back to their office and the hot can of lamb stew.'

"The sunlights differ, but there is only one darkness"

"He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary"

'As beings in the world the twin poles of our existence are conception and death. An incalculable amount has been written about death by philosophers and writers of every kind; little or nothing has been written by most such persons about conception. Yet conception is, to say the least of it, as important to us as death - being the means whereby we come into existence as individuals - and every bit as mysterious'

'No one quite heard him say "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind", nor did anyone quite see him take the step - the TV image on the movie screen was beautiful, but still as marvellously abstract as the branches of a tree, or a painting by Franz Kilne of black beams on a white background. Nonetheless, a cheer went up, and a ripple of extraordinary awareness."

"Marx said we should let the workers rule because then they will rule on behalf of the great mass of society, the working class. Bakunin said no.. If the workers are rulers, they will cease to be workers and will become rulers.. If you look at what's happened in the so-called Marxist societies, perhaps Bakunin's view of human nature was right"

'how harmful overspecialization is. It cuts knowledge at a million points and leaves it bleeding'

'A century devoted to the rationality of technique was also a century so irrational as to open in every mind the real possibility of global destruction'

"he hardly knew whether the Space Program was the noblest expression of the Twentieth Century or the quintessential statement of our fundamental insanity"

On Juan Crisóstomo Lafinur, 'He died in exile; like all men, he was given bad times in which to live'

'Let us admit what all idealists admit: the hallucinatory nature of the world. Let us do what no idealist has done: seek unrealities which confirm that nature. We shall find them, I believe, in the antimonies of Kant and in the dialectics of Zeno.'

'The centre of the universe is everywhere and the circumference nowhere‘.. This phrase was written with exultation in 1584: seventy years later there was no reaction of that fervour left.. men felt lost in time and space. In time, because if future and past are infinite, there cannot really be a when: in space, because if every being is equidistant from the infinite and the infinitesimal, neither can there be a where

Ayers discussing Berkeley, 'technical views of the world gradually - or even rapidly - become embroidered in the way we all think and talk. For example it's now very much a part of the ordinary persons view of thought that we think in some sense with our brains, but it wasn't always so'

'Belief in the Zahir is of Islamic origin, and seems to date from the eighteenth century.. Zahir in Arabic means 'notorious', 'visible'; in this sense it is one of the ninety-nine names of God. and the people.. use it to signify 'beings or things which possess the terrible property of being unforgettable, and whose image finally drive one mad''

"Remember, remember the fifth of November of gunpowder treason and plot. I know of no reason why the gun powder treason should ever be forgot."

'Without a free and untrammelled press, without the unlimited right-of-way association and assemblage, the rule of the broad mass of people is utterly unthinkable... freedom for the supporters of one the government, only for the members of one party.. is no freedom at all'

'Whatever the psychological roots of this delight in destruction might be, it is true that for some people, especially the fans of detective novels, violent thrillers or violent video games, the imagination of resorting to destructive activity or violent actions such as murdering, and provoking bloody car accidents produces great joy and satisfaction'

'Science can be defined as a form of destruction, or a process of permanent destruction of certain ideas, concepts or paradigms'

'destruction can be considered as the very act of creation, since all production involves what might be called ‘destructive transformation’, like wheat being ground into flour..in the same manner, learning is a kind of self-destruction, namely the reshaping of our knowledge framework, the rearrangement or reconstruction of our data and mental representations through which ex-biases could be removed or replaced'

'militarism could lead to greater security and welfare for the masses, further development of communication systems, and an extension of the division of labour.. extension of the division of labour can be verified by the fact that.. long distance trade could not have been carried out without military protection..trade is one of the principal prerequisites of specialization and the extension of the division of labour'

The ordinary healthy high schooled graduate.. has to work fairly hard to produce more than 4000 $ of value per year; but he could destroy a hundred times that much if he set his mind to it.. Given an institutional arrangement in which he could generously abstain from destruction in return for a mere fraction of the value that he might have destroyed, the boy clearly has a calling as an extortionist.. Schelling 1963

'The loss of over six million Polish citizens from a total population in 1939 of thirty-five million represented a casualty rate of 18 per cent, compared with 0.2% in the USA, 0.9% in Great Britain, 2.5% in Japan, 7.4% in Germany, 11.1% in Yugoslavia, and 11.2% in the USSR. Poland became the killing ground of Europe, the new Golgotha'

'Every man should be capable of all ideas and I understand that in the future this will be the case"

"...one of those parasitic books which situate Christ on a boulevard, Hamlet on La Cannebiere or Don Quixote on Wall Street. Like all men of good taste, Menard abhorred these useless carnivals, fit only as he would say to produce the plebeian pleasure of anachronism or (what is worse) to enthral us with the elementary idea that all epochs are the same or are different."

"There are two sorts of living organisms.. those who have a backbone and therefore also walk, at times even run, and others who don't have one, and therefore only creep and cling"