“But isn't it likely that everyone in this world...has killed someone or other on their way to the top?...All I wanted was a chance to be a man--and for that, one murder is enough.”

“Everyone has the best of feelings towards mankind in general, but not towards the individual man. We'll kill men, but we want to save mankind. And that isn't right, your Reverence. The world will be an evil place as long as people don't believe in other people.”

“But didn't everyone get everything? Hadn't they had enough yet? Everything on earth is tailored for this everyone. Everyone gets all the TV programs, damn near all the cinema, and about eighty percent of all music. After that come the secondary medium of painting and those other visual arts that do not move. Those are generally just for someone and although you always hear people moaning that there isn't enough of them, in truth someone does all right. Galleries, museums, basements in Berlin, studio flats, journals, bare walls in urban centers—someone gets what they want and deserve, most of the time. But where are the things that no one wants? Every now and then Alex would see or hear something that appeared to be for no one but soon enough it turned out to be for someone and, after a certain amount of advertising revenue had been spent, would explode into the world for everyone. Who was left to make stuff for no one?”

“The way I see it people don't do what they want to do often enough. They just do some alternative which they'd kind of like to do, which isn't the same thing at all, and as a result that thing isn't enough and they end up depressed and annoyed with everyone else around them.”

“Kill a man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a god.”

“Imagining isn't perfect. You can't get all the way inside someone else...But imagining being someone else, or the world being something else, is the only way in. It is the machine that kills fascists.”