“Tacitus did not write a most dangerous book. His readers made it so.”

“The World is divided into armed camps ready to commit genocide just because we can't agree on whose fairy tales to believe.In the end, Religion will kill us all.”

“No." Tommy turned and headed toward the door. As he reached it he turned and said, "I'm not fucked." The Sartre reader looked up from his book and said, "We all are. We all are.”

“The most dangerous kind of person... is one who is afraid of his own shadow.”

“The wielder of words is the captor of souls.”

“I want to give just a slight indication of the influence the book has had. I knew that George Orwell, in his second novel, A Clergyman's Daughter , published in 1935, had borrowed from Joyce for his nighttime scene in Trafalgar Square, where Deafie and Charlie and Snouter and Mr. Tallboys and The Kike and Mrs. Bendigo and the rest of the bums and losers keep up a barrage of song snatches, fractured prayers, curses, and crackpot reminiscences. But only on my most recent reading of Ulysses did I discover, in the middle of the long and intricate mock-Shakespeare scene at the National Library, the line 'Go to! You spent most of it in Georgina Johnson's bed, clergyman's daughter.' So now I think Orwell quarried his title from there, too.”

“The radicals assumed that acting was more important than speaking. Talking and writing books, Winstanley insisted, is 'all nothing and must die; for action is the life of all, and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing.' It is a thought worth pondering by those who read books about the seventeenth-century radicals, no less than by those who write them. Were you doers or talkers only? Bunyan asked his generation. What canst thou say?”