Unmentioned, what is can become as though it were not. - Aldous Huxley

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumour, and survival a thing beyond the bounds of possibility.

Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Gray Life.

The difference between the mortified but still proud and self-centred stoic and the unmortified hedonist consists in this : the latter, being flabby, shiftless and at heart rather ashamed of himself, lacks the energy and the motive to do much harm except to his own body, mind and spirit; the former, because he has all the secondary virtues and looks down on those who are not like himself, is morally equipped to wish and to be able to do harm on the very largest scale and with a perfectly untroubled conscience.