“Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman.”

Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can’t be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?

Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence – those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you’d collapse. And while you people are overconsuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.

Round pegs in square holes tend to have dangerous thoughts about the social system and tend to infect others with their discontents.

I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.

There seems to be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown.

The survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information.

The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.

No social stability without individual stability.

At this point we find ourselves confronted by a very disquieting question: Do we really wish to act upon our knowledge?

Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.

Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn’t become king. He gets lynched.

All that is needed is money and a candidate who can be coached to look sincere. Political principles and plans for specific action have come to lose most of their importance. The personality of the candidate, the way he is projected by the advertising experts, are the things that really matter.

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.

Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare, it is simply disgraceful.

People intoxicate themselves with work so they won’t see how they really are.

William James once made an acute point about the relationship between happiness and expectation. He argued that satisfaction with ourselves does not require us to succeed in every endeavour.

We don’t usually see light traveling in darkness of space because we only can see its reflection on substance.

Life is the journey between darkness of the womb and darkness of the grave.

In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.

The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.

The cinema is a place of intrinsic indiscernibility between art and non-art.

The difference between the actor and the painter is that the actor would buy somebody a knish in order to have them watch him act.

They do everything from gangsta rap to polka music and every genre in between. It’s amazing.