"The internal class system was eventually changed by the international class system with which Englishmen were likewise obsessed – for ever discussing whether their country was a first-class power, or (after some setback) second-class, third-class, or no class at all. At the beginning of the last century the fear was of Germany; in the middle years, of American and, even more, of Russian competition; at the end, of the Chinese."

"Till the middle of the century practical socialists identified equality with advancement for merit. The trouble started when the left wing emphasized a different interpretation of equality, and, ignoring differences in human ability, urged that everyone, those with talent as well as those without, should attend the same schools and receive the same basic education."

"The future development of children could not be accurately assessed at the tender age of 11. The strain upon parents and children of the competitive examination was too great. Once children were shepherded into the separate pens it was too difficult for those who developed late to transfer from one to another. Their chief interest was not, however, so much educational as social; the left-wingers claimed that to segregate the clever from the stupid was to deepen class divisions. They proposed that all children, irrespective of sex, race, creed, class (that was all right but they went on) or ability, should be lumped together."

"As members of a particular family, they want their children to have every privilege. But at the same time they are opposed to privilege for anyone else’s children. They desire equal opportunity for everyone else’s children, extra for their own."

"The private schools, less at home in the world of industry, technology, and science, gave too much attention to Athens and too little to the atom."

"We need ample holidays - history shows that scientists have often hit upon the missing link in a chain of thought quite unexpectedly when they were basthing in the sea, walking in the mountains or drowsing by the Caribbean."

"The horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart—an endless source of heresies in religion, folly in counsel, infidelity in marriage, and inconstancy in friendship. The humans live in time, and experience reality successively. To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change. And since they need change, the Enemy (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has made eating pleasurable."

"The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour's talents—or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall. He wants each man, in the long run, to be able to recognise all creatures (even himself) as glorious and excellent things."

"The Enemy allows this disappointment to occur on the threshold of every human endeavour. It occurs when the boy who has been enchanted in the nursery by Stories from the Odyssey buckles down to really learning Greek. It occurs when lovers have got married and begin the real task of learning to live together. In every department of life it marks the transition from dreaming aspiration to laborious doing."

"The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle onto the Enemy's own ground."

"But, as I said before, it is jargon, not reason, you must rely on. The mere word phase will very likely do the trick. I assume that the creature has been through several of them before—they all have—and that he always feels superior and patronising to the ones he has emerged from, not because he has really criticised them but simply because they are in the past."

"Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts."

"I would make it a rule to eradicate from my patient any strong personal taste which is not actually a sin, even if it is something quite trivial such as a fondness for county cricket or collecting stamps or drinking cocoa. Such things, I grant you, have nothing of virtue in them; but there is a sort of innocence and humility and self–forgetfulness about them which I distrust. The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring twopence what other people say about it, is by that very fact fore–armed against some of our subtlest modes of attack. You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favour of the "best" people, the "right" food, the "important" books. I have known a human defended from strong temptations to social ambition by a still stronger taste for tripe and onions."

"As one of the humans has said, active habits are strengthened by repetition but passive ones are weakened. The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel."

"'But how do you know there is no Landlord?' 'Christopher Columbus, Galileo, the earth is round, invention of printing, gunpowder!!' exclaimed Mr. Enlightenment in such a loud voice that the pony shied."

"That night he waited till his parents were asleep and then, putting some few needments together, he stole out by the back door and set his face to the West to seek for the Island."

"John limped on for about ten minutes. Suddenly he heard Mr. Mammon calling out to him. He stopped and turned round. ... 'What do you suppose they live on?' 'I never thought of that.' 'Every man of them earns his living by writing for me or having shares in my land. I suppose the "Clevers" is some nonsense they do in their spare time — when they're not beating up tramps,' and he glanced at John."

"Ironically, the standard of cuisine in the apartment building had begun to rise during these days of its greatest decline, as more and more delicacies came to light."

"Even the run-down nature of the high-rise was a model of the world into which the future was carrying them, a landscape beyond technology where everything was either derelict or, more ambiguously, recombined in unexpected but more meaningful ways. Laing pondered this — sometimes he found it difficult not to believe that they were living in a future that had already taken place, and was now exhausted."

"He enjoyed watching Steele at work, obsessed with these expressions of mindless violence. Each one brought them a step closer to the ultimate goal of the high-rise, a realm where their most deviant impulses were free at last to exercise themselves in any way they wished. At this point physical violence would cease at last."

"The darkness was more comforting, a place where real illusions might flourish."

"Now the new order had emerged, in which life in the high-rise revolved around three obsessions — security, food and sex."

"Let the psychotics take over. They alone understood what was happening."

"'One rule in life,' he murmured to himself. 'If you can smell garlic, everything is all right.'"

"... only in the darkness could one become sufficiently obsessive, deliberately play on all one's repressed instincts."

"Even their insistence on educating their children, the last reflex of any exploited group before it sank into submission, marked the end of their resistance."

"The untruth of the accusation, which they all knew well, only served to reinforce it ... By the logic of the high-rise those most innocent of any offence became the most guilty."

"'It's a mistake to imagine now we're all moving towards a state of happy primitivism. The model here seems to be less the noble savage than our un-innocent post-Freudian selves, outraged by all that over-indulgent toilet-training, dedicated breast-feeding and parental affection – obviously a more dangerous mix than anything our Victorian forebears had to cope with. Our neighbours had happy childhoods to a man and still feel angry. Perhaps they resent never having had a chance to become perverse.'"

"Hours on the gymnasium exercycles had equipped them for no more than hours on the gymnasium exercycles."

"Without knowing it, [the architect] had constructed a giant vertical zoo. All the events of the past few months made sense if one realized that these brilliant and exotic creatures had learned how to open the doors."

"... [F]or all their descent into barbarism, the residents of the high-rise remained faithful to their origins and continued to generate a vast amount of refuse."

"Above all, he looked down on them for their good taste."

"Royal liked ... that [the birds] had all flown here from the same archaic landscape, responding to the same image of the sacred violence to come."

"In a sense, these people were the vanguard of a well-to-do and well-educated proletariat of the future, boxed up in these expensive apartments with their elegant furniture and intelligent sensibilities, and no possibility of escape."

"... [I]n Anne's world it was not only necessary for work to be done, but be seen to be done."

"Without realizing it, [the architect] had given these people a means of escaping into a new life, and a pattern of social organization that would become the paradigm of all future high-rise blocks."

"At times Royal suspected that his neighbours unconsciously hoped that everything would decline even further."

"'They're all making their own films down there,' Anne told him, clearly fascinated by her heady experience of the lower orders at work and play. 'Every time someone gets beaten up about ten cameras are shooting away.'"

"Living in high-rises required a special type of behavior, one that was acquiescent, restrained, even perhaps slightly mad. A psychotic would have a ball here, he reflected. Vandalism had plagued these slab and tower blocks since their inception. Every torn-out piece of telephone equipment, every handle wrenched off a fire-safety door, every kicked-in electricity meter represented a stand against decerebration."

"He felt excited in a confused way."

"... their territorial instinct, in its psychological and social senses, had weakened to the point where it was ripe for exploitation."

"'You think that we're secretly enjoying all this?Don't you? I'd guess so, doctor. Togetherness is beating up an empty elevator. For the first time since we were three years old what we do makes absolutely no difference.'"

"...[T]he elevators pumping up and down in their long shafts resembled pistons in the chamber of a heart. The residents moving along the corridors were the cells in a network of arteries; the lights in their apartments the neurones of a brain."

"For some time now he had known he was developing a powerful phobia about the high-rise. He was constantly aware of the immense weight of concrete stacked above him, and the sense that his body was the focus of the lines of power running for the building, almost as if [the architect] had deliberately designed his body be held within their grip. At night as he lay beside his sleeping wife, he would often wake from an uneasy sleep into the suffocating bedroom, conscious of each of the 999 other apartments pressing on the walls and ceiling, forcing the air from his chest."

"Their real opponent was not the hierarchy of residents in the heights far above them, but the image of the building in their own minds, the multiplying layers of concrete that anchored them to the floor."

"In the future, violence would clearly become a valuable form of social cement."

"Within half an hour almost all of the women were drunk, a yardstick Laing had long used to measure the success of a party."

"The spectacular view always made Laing aware of his ambivalent feelings for this concrete landscape. Part of its appeal lay all too clearly in the fact that this was an environment built, not for man, but for man's absence."

"A new social type was being created by the apartment building, a cool, unemotional personality impervious to the psychological pressures of high-rise life, with minimal needs for privacy, who thrived like an advanced species of machine in the neutral atmosphere ... [They] were people who were content with their lives in the high-rise, who felt no personal objection to an impersonal steel and concrete landscape, no qualms about the invasion of their privacy by government agencies and data-processing organizations, and if anything welcomed these invisible intrusions, using them for their own purposes. These people were the first to master a new type of late twentieth-century life, they thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never disappointed."