He tortured, not to force you to reveal a fact, but to force you to collude in a fiction. - Martin Amis

I've got to get this stuff out of my system. No, more than that, much more. I've got to get my system out of my system. That's what I've got to do.

Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.

There are several accounts, written or deposed, by the guards, executioners and inhumers of the Romanovs. One of the inhumers said that he could 'die in peace because he had squeezed the Empress's — — -.'*

*Pipes's note reads: 'Deposition by P. V. Kukhtenko in Solokov Dossier I, dated September 8, 1918; omission in the original.