“In its essence, any art that relies on words makes use of their ability to eat away — of their corrosive function — just as etching depends on the corrosive power of nitric acid.”

“Power can be very addictive. And it can be corrosive. And it's important for the media to call to account people who abuse their power.”

“Religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good.”

“Curran and I mixed about as well as glycerin and nitric acid: put us together, shake a bit, and hit the deck as we exploded.”

“Loneliness becomes an acid that eats away at you.”

“You know, we’re not used to secrecy up here. It’s not encouraged. We all have to work together to keep alive. Secrecy is corrosive, Professor, bad for morale.”

“Time is a corrosive fluid, dissolving motivation, destroying novelty, and leaching the joy from life. But forgetting is a fraught process, one that is prone to transcription errors and personality flaws. Delete the wrong pattern, and you can end up becoming someone else. Memories exhibit dependencies, and their management is one of the highest medical art forms.”

“Liberalism is extremely harmful in a revolutionary collective. It is a corrosive which eats away unity, undermines cohesion causes apathy and creates dissension. It robs the revolutionary ranks of compact organization and strict discipline, prevents policies from being carried through and alienates the Party organization from the masses which the Party leads. It is an extremely bad tendency.”

“I should have killed or confused you when I had the chance. You are destruction. You are corrosion. You are death to order. Family, cast him out before he infects the rest of us as he has these.”

“Theologians who drink too deeply of the cup of social disenchantment risk constructing a paper church of their own imagination. Theory, in other words, is not enough to provide an escape from the unfettered and corrosive relativism of the market. Submission to Rome is the only ecclesial reality with enough authority.”