“We men of this age are rotten with book-lore and with a yearning for the past.”

“We travel not for trafficking alone;By hotter winds our hearts are fanned:For lust of knowing what should not be knownWe take the Golden Road to Samarkand.”

“Pass not beneath, O Caravan, or pass not singing. Have you heardThat silence where the birds are dead yet something pipeth like a bird?”

“Some men borrow books; some men steal books; and others beg presentation copies from the author.”

“Thus, when a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce...in the same individual, we have the best possible conditions for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries. Such men do not remain mere critics and understanders with their intellect. Their ideas posses them, they inflict them, for better or worse, upon their companions or their age.”

“The Bible was written two thousand years ago. The world is a different place now. Stories that had meaning then are meaningless now. Beliefs that might have been valid then are invalid now. Those books should be looked at in the same way we look at anything of that age with interest with an acknowledgement of the historical importance but they should not be thought of as anything that has any value.”

“Our parents' generation carried the past memorialized in paint, porcelain, and wood; we cast it off. Even our national history is remembered in terms of the worst we did, not the best.”