“No, what was sad in his case was that he, who didn’t care for carved oak, should have his drawing-room panelled with it, while people who do care for it have to pay enormous prices to get it. It seems to be the rule of this world. Each person has what he doesn’t want, and other people have what he does want.”

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Ender's Game series, First Meetings in the Enderverse (2003), The Polish Boy

The Saviors of God (1923)
Context: I do not care what face other ages and other people have given to the enormous, faceless essence. They have crammed it with human virtues, with rewards and punishments, with certain ties. They have given a face to their hopes and fears, they have submitted their anarchy to a rhythm, they have found a higher justification by which to live and labor. They have fulfilled their duty.
But today we have gone beyond these needs; we have shattered this particular mask of the Abyss; our God no longer fits under the old features.
Our hearts have overbrimmed with new agonies, with new luster and silence. The mystery has grown savage, and God has grown greater. The dark powers ascend, for they have also grown greater, and the entire human island quakes.
Let us stoop down to our hearts and confront the Abyss valiantly. Let us try to mold once more, with our flesh and blood, the new, contemporary face of God.
For our God is not an abstract thought, a logical necessity, a high and harmonious structure made of deductions and speculations.
He is not an immaculate, neutral, odorless, distilled product of our brains, neither male nor female.
He is both man and woman, mortal and immortal, dung and spirit. He gives birth, fecundates, slaughters — death and eros in one — and then he begets and slays once more, dancing spaciously beyond the boundaries of a logic which cannot contain the antinomies.

Source: Acheron

As quoted in Anti-Israel remarks 'misunderstood,' says Iranian official, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 16 December 2005 http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2005/12/16/iran_holocaust051216.html,

you ask. "Well, I'll get more," he says. Just as at cricket, you get more runs. There's no use in the runs, but to get more of them than other people is the game. So all that great foul city of London there, — rattling, growling, smoking, stinking, — a ghastly heap of fermenting brickwork, pouring out poison at every pore, — you fancy it is a city of work? Not a street of it! It is a great city of play; very nasty play and very hard play, but still play.

The Crown of Wild Olive, lecture I: Work, sections 23-24 (1866)

on America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009
2000s, 2009

Source: Our Souls at Night

"Why Government Is the Problem" (February 1, 1993), p. 19

Power: A Radical View (1974)