“Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror.”

“Do not allow to slip away from you freedoms the people who came before you won with such hard knocks.”

“There is no such thing as liberty. You only change one sort of domination for another. All we can do is to choose our master.”

“Ethics and equity and the principles of justice do not change with the calendar.”

“Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.”

“Men always do leave off really thinking, when the last bit of wild animal dies in them.”

“Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.”

“They say geniuses mostly have great mothers. They mostly have sad fates.”

“I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.”

“The essential function of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind.”

“Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas!”