“Their whole life depends on spending money, and now they’ve got none to spend. That’s our civilization and our education: bring up the masses to depend entirely on spending money, and then the money gives out.”

One could laugh at the world better if it didn’t mix tender kindliness with its brutality.

The world is a raving idiot, and no man can kill it: though I’ll do my best. But you’re right. We must rescue ourselves as best we can.

There is no pornography without a secrecy.

Obscenity only comes in when the mind despises and fears the body, and the body hates and resists the mind.

Nobody knows you. You don’t know yourself. And I, who am half in love with you, What am I in love with? My own imaginings?

For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.

What the eye doesn’t see and the mind doesn’t know, doesn’t exist.

Recklessness is almost a man’s revenge on his woman.

All hopes of eternity and all gain from the past he would have given to have her there, to be wrapped warm with him in one blanket, and sleep, only sleep. It seemed the sleep with the woman in his arms was the only necessity.

There is nothing to save, now all is lost, but a tiny core of stillness in the heart like the eye of a violet.

One must learn to love, and go through a good deal of suffering to get to it, and the journey is always towards the other soul.

Those that go searching for love only make manifest their own lovelessness, and the loveless never find love, only the loving find love, and they never have to seek for it.

She was not herself–she was not anything. She was something that is going to be–soon–soon–very soon. But as yet, she was only imminent.

For to desire is better than to possess, the finality of the end was dreaded as deeply as it was desired.

If a woman hasn’t got a tiny streak of harlot in her, she’s a dry stick as a rule.

A man could no longer be private and withdrawn. The world allows no hermits.

Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values.

Distributed intelligence is the key to the advancement of human civilization. Dictatorships, communist countries, monarchies in the past all eventually collapsed because of their inefficiency in moving information.

The glossy surface of our civilization hides a real intellectual decadence.

The triumph of the industrial arts will advance the cause of civilization more rapidly than its warmest advocates could have hoped, and contribute to the permanent prosperity and strength of the country far more than the most splendid victories of successful war.

Our way of life is at stake, our grandchildren are at stake, the future of civilization is at stake.

Our insatiable drive to rummage deep beneath the surface of the earth is a willful expansion of our dysfunctional civilization into Nature.

Where is everybody? Humans could theoretically colonize the galaxy in a million years or so, and if they could, astronauts from older civilizations could do the same. So why haven’t they come to Earth?

Man’s great power of thinking, remembering, and communicating are responsible for the evolution of civilization.