“There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago.”

As quoted in "Age of unreason" by Jeannette Baxter in The Guardian (22 June 2004) http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/jun/22/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.jgballard
Context: The notions about the benefits of transgression in my last three novels are not ones I want to see fulfilled. Rather, they are extreme possibilities that may be forced into reality by the suffocating pressures of the conformist world we inhabit. Boredom and a deadening sense of total pointlessness seem to drive a lot of meaningless crimes, from the Hungerford and Columbine shootings to the Dando murder, and there have been dozens of similar crimes in the US and elsewhere over the past 30 years.
These meaningless crimes are much more difficult to explain than the 9/11 attacks, and say far more about the troubled state of the western psyche. My novels offer an extreme hypothesis which future events may disprove — or confirm. They're in the nature of long-range weather forecasts.

Frothingham, Jessie Peabody. Sea Fighters from Drake to Farragut New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1902. p. 314
1800s

Source: As quoted in "Critic Kenneth Tynan Has Mellowed But Is Still England's Stingingest Gadfly" by Godfrey Smith in The New York Times (9 January 1966)

cited in: Artscribe. Nr. 7; 13; 17-18 (1977). p. 36
The Shape of Time, 1982

On Eagle's Wings, 1977, p. 159
As of a Trumpet, On Eagle's Wings

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

The Drowned and the Saved (1986)

Colonel Doctor Jens Ladislav in Ch. 33 : dezmai of the drums, p. 294
The Visitor (2002)