Have a little sociological beano. As you said – in sociology one can do anything and call it work.

But you are involved in the world, and your actions have consequences for other people, and if you don’t recognize that, then that’s the supreme kind of cruelty. Everyone shares someone else’s fate to some...

If God had been a liberal, we wouldn’t have had the Ten Commandments — we’d have the Ten Suggestions.

With sociology one can do anything and call it work

With my sort of book there’s no resolution, because there’s no solution. The problems aren’t answered in the end because there is no answer. They’re problems that are handed on to the reader, not solved...

You Liberals think that goats are just sheep from broken homes.

One can’t always satisfy oneself, I suppose; it’s other people one can’t satisfy. One thinks one’s way of life is sound and then comes an external vision to say: you are a fake, you are...

Genitals are a great distraction to scholarship

If God had meant us to have group sex, he’d have given us more organs.

Madness, genius, originality – it’s all the same thing; it’s a breaking of our normal value structure and the substitution of another one.

Treece quite seriously divided the world into writers, who led life as a conscious effort, and people, and people who didn’t; sometimes he preferred writers and sometimes he preferred people.

Only the old are innocent. That is what the Victorians understood, and the Christians. Original sin is a property of the young. The old grow beyond corruption very quickly.

Well, really, how would you like to make love with someone who kept twittering about his pure mystic modality and wanted to stick flowers in your navel?

You have a faculty for defining the simplest in terms of the grandiose, so that a poor devil like me can’t understand it.

Life is a crisis – so what!

The trouble with me is, Treece thought, that I’m a liberal humanist who believes in original sin. I think of man as a noble creature who has only to extend himself to the full range...

The English are polite by telling lies. The Americans are polite by telling the truth.

..it lay in the true function of the university to promote that interplay of view, that discussion and dispute, that cumulative narrowing down of possibilities that led to the formation of accurate opinion. The students...

Culture is a way of coping with the world by defining it in detail.

This education we’re giving them is the tool of destruction, of course; that’s what makes it so painful. We’re showing them how to accomplish the ritual murder of ourselves.

My experience of ships is that on them one makes an interesting discovery about the world. One finds one can do without it completely.

There’s always something or someone to do.”But don’t you ever find it too much work, Howard?’ asks Flora, ‘All this dressing and undressing, all these undistinguished climaxes, all this chasing for more of the same,...

Well, aren’t you just saying it’s better to be neurotic, sensitive, and miserable than unimaginative, adjusted and content? Is it really better?

English history is all about men liking their fathers, and American history is all about men hating their fathers and trying to burn down everything they ever did.

Well, it’s really no use our talking in the way we have been doing if the words we use mean something different to each of us…and nothing.

Most beds aren’t as intimate as people think they are.

One can always satisfy oneself, I suppose; it’s other people one can’t satisfy. One thinks one’s way of life is sound and then comes an external vision to say: you are a fake, you are...

This was the sort of thing that happened to persons of this sort, sensitives, who fought the world and always, in the end, let it win, because there was a lot more taste to defeat...

I like the English. They have the most rigid code of immorality in the world.