“People said it because other people said it. They did not know why it was being said and heard everywhere. They did not give or ask for reasons. 'Reason,' Dr. Pritchett had told them, 'is the most naive of all superstitions.' 'The source of public opinion?' said Claude Slagenhop in a public radio speech. 'There is no source of public opinion. It is spontaneously general. It is a reflex of the collective instinct of the collective mind.”

“Since there is no such entity as 'the public,' since the public is merely a number of individuals, any claimed or implied conflict of 'the public interest' with private intersts means that the interests of some men are to be sacrificed to the interest and wishes of others.”

“He felt something dark and leering in the manner with which people spoke of Prescott's genius; as if they were not doing homage to Prescott, but spitting upon genius. For once, Keating could not follow people; it was too clear, even to him, that public favor had ceased being a recognition of merit, that it had become almost a brand of shame.”

“All public projects are mausoleums, not always in shape, but always in cost.”

“Rationality is man's basic virtue, the source of all his other virtues. Man's basic vice, the source of all evils, is the act of unfocussing his mind, the suspension of his conciousness, which is not blindness, but the refusal to see, not ignorance, but the refusal to know. Irrationality is the rejection of man's means of survival and therefore, a commitment to a course of blind destruction; that is anti-mind, anti-life.”

“He had just graduated from college...and he wanted to decide whether life was worth living. He did not know that this was the question in his mind. He did not think of dying. He thought only that he wished to find joy and reason and meaning in life-and that none had been offered to him anywhere.”

“Did it ever occur to you," asked Kira, "that I may be here for the very unusual, unnatural reason of wanting to learn a work I like only because I like it?”