Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.

And our resistance against changing our habits of thought is immense and unrelenting. If we try, briefly, we find it ass vexing and unrewarding as writing a letter with the left hand. What we are used to is comfortable; what is comfortable is good; and what is good is right - this is the unspoken belief of almost all people everywhere. When a scientist, however, tackles a problem that has hitherto seemed insoluble, he abandons all his preconceptions, and all the preconceptions of the past. Only when he begins to question the basic assumptions he has always held can he make an utterly fresh start, unencumbered by the intellectual baggage of the past.

"It's odd that the people who worry whether certain plays are "morally offensive" so rarely worry about the moral offensiveness of war, poverty, bigotry."