“If we run the curricula race of the safe, the cursus honorum of the domesticated cattle of modernity, we learn nothing but our own ignorance andour prize is the death of the imagination in the cremation of our hopes.”

“The more we learn about the world, and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, specific, and articulate will be our knowledge of what we do not know; our knowledge of our ignorance. For this indeed, is the main source of our ignorance - the fact that our knowledge can be only finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.”

“People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, we shall differ in our nothingness.”

“Our education serves three purposes. First, we must learn what others think we must know. Second, we cannot profess anything that is not widely accepted. Third, we must learn to hide our own ignorance and never speak about it in public.”

“We cut the throat of a calf and hang it up by the heels to bleed to death so that our veal cutlet may be white; we nail geese to a board and cram them with food because we like the taste of liver disease; we tear birds to pieces to decorate our women's hats; we mutilate domestic animals for no reason at all except to follow an instinctively cruel fashion; and we connive at the most abominable tortures in the hope of discovering some magical cure for our own diseases by them.”

“The only hope I have left for you hangs on a great doubt - the doubt whether we are, or are not, the masters of our own destinies. It may be that mortal free-will can conquer mortal fate; and that going, as we all do, inevitably to death, we go inevitably to nothing that is before death.”