Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory - all these have served, in H. G. Wells's phrase, as Doors in the Wall.

---

History is the record of what human beings have been impelled to do by their ignorance and the enormous bumptiousness that makes them canonize their ignorance as a political or religious dogma.

---

All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.

---

The urge to transcend self-conscious selfhood is, as I have said, a principal appetite of the soul.

---

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

---

The urge to escape from selfhood and the environment is in almost everyone almost all the time.

---

In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.

---

A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.

---

I don't care where I'm from. Nor where I'm going. From hell to hell.

---

Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.

---