It's a funny thing in my job: you remain perpetually lonely in a world where loneliness is the rarest commodity. - Brian Aldiss

All of which makes one feel that the centuries of science upon which our western culture is based have travelled unmarked through the popular mind. A surprising number of people are willing to junk the entire accumulation of knowledge since Ancient Greece after watching Uri Geller perform for five minutes on their twenty-three inch screen.

Civilisation is the distance that man has placed between himself and his own excreta.

Only a madman would claim that there is some thing unreal about reality.