You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.
Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly-they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.
What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when the anthrax bombs are popping all around you?
What fun it would be if one didn’t have to think about happiness!
We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters.
Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can’t.
There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.
The greater a man’s talents, the greater his power to lead astray.
That is the secret of happiness and virtue-liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.
Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness. That’s why I have to keep these books locked up in the safe.
One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.
It isn’t only art that’s incompatible with happiness; it’s also science. Science is dangerous; we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.
