“She thougt of sunrise over the library slope at Cornell University that nobody out on it had seen because the slope faces west.”

Time is never wasted if you remember to bring along something to read.

Why should things be easy to understand?

What, I should only trust good people? Man, good people get bought and sold every day. Might as well trust somebody evil once in a while, it makes no more or less sense.

Despair came over her, as it will when nobody around has any sexual relevance to you.

Our history is an aggregate of last moments.

You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.

All variables are independent.

A woman is only half of something there are usually two sides to.

All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all.

The general public has long been divided into two parts; those who think that science can do anything and those who are afraid it will.

Ills are many, blessings few, but dreams tonight will shelter you.

If there is something comforting – religious, if you want – about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.

Teamwork,” Koteks snarled, “is one word for it, yeah. What it really is is a way to avoid responsibility. It’s a symptom of the gutlessness of the whole society.

It takes, unhappily, no more than a desk and writing supplies to turn any room into a confessional.

There is no real direction here, neither lines of power nor cooperation. Decisions are never really made – at best they manage to emerge, from a chaos of peeves, whims, hallucinations and all around assholery.

You know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. But another world’s intrusion into this one. Most of the time we coexist peacefully, but when we do touch there’s cataclysm.

How then is perfection to be sought? Wherein lies our hope? In education, and in nothing else.

The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.

The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn.

I believe finally, that education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience; that the process and the goal of education are one and the same thing.

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.

Natural ability without education has more often raised a man to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.

If an ignorant person is attracted by the things of the world, that is bad. But if a learned person is thus attracted, it is worse.

Into this error men have, probably, been led by viewing education in a false light; not considering it as the first step to form a being advancing gradually towards perfection; but only as a preparation for life.