“Everyone had an ulterior motive in his worldview. Everyone was self-serving and therefore a potential instrument of pain. The world was a lonely, awful, brutal, terrible place.”

“Memory was a story you told yourself about yourself, extrapolated from a tiny dot-matrix of facts.”

“The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay. Nobody knows who invented hay, the idea of cutting grass in the autumn and storing it in large enough quantities to keep horses and cows alive through the winter. All we know is that the technology of hay was unknown to the Roman Empire but was known to every village of medieval Europe. Like many other crucially important technologies, hay emerged anonymously during the so-called Dark Ages. According to the Hay Theory of History, the invention of hay was the decisive event which moved the center of gravity of urban civilization from the Mediterranean basin to Northern and Western Europe. The Roman Empire did not need hay because in a Mediterranean climate the grass grows well enough in winter for animals to graze. North of the Alps, great cities dependent on horses and oxen for motive power could not exist without hay. So it was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York.”

“Everyone has an ulterior motive. Everyone wants something, and everyone is willing to do whatever they haveto in order to get it. Regardless of who winds up hurt in the process.”

“But the problem was that I had retreated so far into myself - shielding myself from the ghosts and memories of this place - that I had become reliant upon the comfort and rituals and plans.”

“The conservative has little to fear from the man whose reason is the servant of his passions, but let him beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest and most terrible of passions. These are the wreckers of outworn empires.”

“By the time I twenty, I was just like everyone else. I still am”