Don't try to behave as though you were essentially sane and naturally good. We're all demented sinners in the same cosmic boat - and the boat is perpetually sinking.

We sink ships and try to pretend that they’re just ships — things without people in them. It’s dishonest, but we do it anyway.

We're all mad, the whole damned race. We're wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions about the penetrability of partitions, we're all mad and in solitary confinement.

Being in a ship is like being in jail, with the chance of being drowned.

Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition.

It’s time for us to wake up and face the truth, that we are a captive species on a prison planet, but the fact that we are so close to understanding the science of our imprisonment means that we are also just beginning to touch the key that locks the door, and if we are strong, if we defy and defeat the sinister forces that rule us now, we have a chance at last to unlock this place and do what we are able to do, that we are richly capable of doing, that those who love us—and they are out there, too—have hoped and sought that we should do from time immemorial.

Imagine that. Terrible, terrible, the way we have all bent to the yoke; the affection we have for the harness about us.

The main thing to understand is that we are imprisoned in some kind of work of art.