All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.
When your eyes are fixed in the stare of unconsciousness, and your throat coughs the last gasping breath - as one dragged in the dark to a great precipice - what assistance are a wife and child?
Captain Shotover: How much does your soul eat? Ellie: Oh, a lot. It eats music and pictures and books and mountains and lakes and beautiful things to wear and nice people to be with.
The medical profession (is) a conspiracy to hide its own shortcomings. No doubt the same may be said of all professions. They are all conspiracies against the laity... (U)ntil there is a practicable alternative to blind trust in the doctor, the truth about the doctor is so terrible that we dare not face it.
During the last considerable epidemic at the turn of the century, I was a member of the Health Committee of London Borough Council, and I learned how the credit of vaccination is kept up statistically by diagnosing all the revaccinated cases (of smallpox) as pustular eczema, varioloid or what not---except smallpox.
The technical history of modern harmony is a history of growth of toleration by the human ear of chords that at first sounded discordant and senseless to the main body of contemporary professional musicians.
The utmost I can bear for myself in my best days is that I was one of the hundred best playwrights
in the world, which is hardly a supreme distinction.