My own self-deception at least promised some kind of pleasure. Theirs offered nothing but terror and guilt. - Michael Moorcock

It becomes so easy to believe what one wishes to believe," Jhary said wearily. "So easy.

How true it is when they say there is nothing which makes a man more furious than the discovery that he has deceived himself!

I had sampled several such brotherhoods, including the Rosey Cross and the Orange Lodge, during the period in which I examined the Supernatural and found it not merely uninstructive but damnably dull, its members possessing nothing in the way of individual imagination and a great need to seek confirmation in numbers for the merits of miserable little madnesses....Such people as a rule were lonely, confounded misfits, attempting to alter the surrounding evidence of Nature by inventing abstractions to explain why common facts were false and ordinary reality a poor illusion.