“You're in a bad way! Apparently, you have developed a soul.”

“You're in bad shape. It looks like you're developing a soul.”

“What's going on? A soul? Did you say, a soul? What the hell! Next thing you know we'll have cholera again. What did I tell you? [He tossed the thin one on his horns.] I told you so... we should operate on all of them, on the imagination. Extirpate the imagination. Surgery's the only answer... nothing but surgery...”

“You're afraid of it because it's stronger than you, you hate it because you're afraid of it, you love it because you can't master it. You can only love something that refuses to be mastered.”

“I've come to read and hear many unlikely things about the times when people lived in freedom, i.e., the unorganized savage state. But the most unlikely thing, it seems to me, is this: how could the olden day governmental power - primitive though it was - have allowed people to live without anything like our Table, without the scheduled walks, without the precise regulation of mealtimes, getting up and going to bed whenever it occurred to them? Various historians even say that, apparently, in those times, light burned in the streets all night long, and all night long, people rode and walked the streets. This I just cannot comprehend in any way. Their faculties of reason may not have been developed, but they must have understood more broadly that living like that amounted to mass murder - literally - only it was committed slowly, day after day. The State (humaneness) forbade killing to death any one person but didn't forbid the half-killing of millions. To kill a man, that is, to decrease the sum of a human life span by fifty years - this was criminal. But decreasing the sum of many humans' lives by fifty million years - this was not criminal. Isn't that funny?”

“My dear, you are a mathematician. You're even more, you're a philosopher of mathematics. So do this for me: Tell me the final number.”

“You don't look normal, dear. You look sick. Because sick and not normal are the same thing. You're destroying yourself, and no one is going to tell you that - no one.”