'Let me out!' 'You want to get out of the car?' said Lakey. 'Yes,' said Harald. 'You bury her. You and the "group."' Lakey stopped the car. He got ou… - Mary McCarthy

She [Polly] did not approve of revolutions, unless they were absolutely necessary, and she thought it peculiar, to say the least, that her father and his friends were eager to make revolutions in democratic countries like France or the United States instead of concentrating on Hitler and Mussolini, who ought to be overthrown. Of course, as her father said, it was pretty hopeless to make a revolution against Hitler for the time being, since the workers' parties had all been suppressed; still, it seemed rather unfair to penalize Roosevelt and Blum for not being Hitler. Fair play, replied her father, was a bourgeois concept and did not apply against the class enemy.

The rationalist mind has always had its doubts about Venice. The watery city receives a dry inspection, as though it were a myth for the credulous — poets and honeymooners.

"But what about church attendance figures?" ventured Harriet. "Aren't modern people supposed to be feeling a lack in their lives that they need religion to fill?" Martha shrugged. "An advertising gambit," she said. "First you convince people that they lack something and then you send them a product to remedy it. People 'need' religion to 'deepen their awareness' or give them 'tragic irony' — the way I 'need' a facial cream to make my life more glamorous." […] "But if there is a lack, Martha?" said Dolly. "Then it ought not to be filled," said Martha. "If it's a real lack, it's a necessary hollow in life that can't be stuffed up, like a chicken. Insufficiency. Shortcoming. I don't need God as a measure to feel that. Do you, Dolly?" "God, no!" said Dolly.