“Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.”

“There is no standard normal. Normal is subjective. There are seven billion versions of normal on this planet.”

“If we do something over and over, it becomes normal. If we see the same thing over and over, it becomes normal.”

“Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.”

“Normality is a way to nowhere. A normal company will go bankrupt.”

“The normal state of a free society is a state of famine.”

“There should be no general election until 2020. There should be a normal Autumn Statement, held in the normal way at the normal time, and no emergency Budget.”

“…we are willing to admit the normality of the abnormal—are willing to admit that we never understood the normal better than when it has been allowed to reach its full growth and become the abnormal.”

“There is no such thing as a normal period of history. Normality is a fiction of economic textbooks.”

“This was always the hard part. If you knew what was normal to the enemy, then everything became easy: you could lull them to sleep by feeding them normal, and you could scare the hell out of them by suddenly taking normal away. But normal to Afghans and Chechens was so different from normal to Russians that it took a bit of work for a man like Sokolov to establish what it was.”