The Atlas

“We must reject that most dismal and fatuous notion that education is a preparation for life.”

“Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.”

“The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.”

“The bible should be taught so early and so thoroughly that it sinks straight to the bottom of the mind where everything that comes along can settle on it.”

“Beauty and truth may be attributes of good writing, but if the writer deliberately aims at truth, he is likely to find that what he has hit is the didactic.”

“Writing: I certainly do rewrite my central myth in every book, and would never read or trust any writer who did not also do so.”

“The simplest questions are the hardest to answer.”

“War appeals to young men because it is fundamentally auto-eroticism.”

“In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.”

“The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind.”