“[T]he useful idiots, the leftists who are idealistically believing in the beauty of the Soviet socialist or Communist or whatever system, when they get disillusioned, they become the worst enemies. That’s why my KGB instructors specifically made the point: never bother with leftists. Forget about these political prostitutes. Aim higher. […] They serve a purpose only at the stage of destabilization of a nation. For example, your leftists in the United States: all these professors and all these beautiful civil rights defenders. They are instrumental in the process of the subversion only to destabilize a nation. When their job is completed, they are not needed any more. They know too much. Some of them, when they get disillusioned, when they see that Marxist-Leninists come to power—obviously they get offended—they think that they will come to power. That will never happen, of course. They will be lined up against the wall and shot.”

“[S]omehow, without his being aware of it, time had coated his awe with a rind of disillusionment, and the wine of wonder had turned to vinegar.”

“She’d stood by that creed. No softness, because the world wasn’t soft; lots of laughter, because if you were in on the joke, the joke couldn’t be on you; And no wanting what you couldn’t take, because the world never gave.Or so she’d thought.”

“He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment.”

“We dream, we wake on a cold hillside, we pursue the dream again. In the beginning was the dream, and the work of disenchantment never ends.”

“All knowledge hurts.”

“The search for truth takes you where the evidence leads you, even if, at first, you don’t want to go there.”

“It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.”

“Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.”