"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."

"... [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."

"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."

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

"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."

"'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.'"

"The degree of vandalism was deliberately excessive, almost as if it served a more important secondary role, disguising the calculated way in which the residents of the high-rise, by ripping out all the phone lines, were cutting themselves off from the outside world."

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

"Not for the first time Laing reflected that he and his neighbours were most eager for trouble as the most effective means of enlarging their sex lives."

"'A low crime-rate, doctor', she told him amiably, 'is clearly a sign of social deprivation.'"

"[There was a] falling interest in civilized conventions of any kind. None of his neighbors cared what food they ate. Neither Laing nor his friends had prepared a decent meal for weeks, and had reached the point where they opened a can at random when they felt hungry. By the same token no one cared what they drank, interested only in getting drunk as quickly as possible and blunting whatever sensibilities were left to them."

"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."

"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."

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

"'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.'"

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

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

"The more arid and effectless life became in the high-rise, the greater the possibilities it offered. By its very efficiency, the high-rise took over the task of maintaining the social structure that supported them all. For the first time it removed the need to repress every kind of anti-social behaviour, and left them free to explore any deviant or wayward impulses. It was precisely in these areas that the most important and most interesting aspect of their lives would take place. Secure within the shell of the high-rise, like passengers on board an automatically piloted airliner, they were free to behave in any way they wished, explore the darkest corners they could find. In many ways, the high-rise was a model of all that technology had done to make possible the expression of a truly 'free' psychopathology."

"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."

"But even before they sat down together on her bed Laing knew that, almost as an illustration of the paradoxical logic of the high-rise, their relationship would end rather than begin with this first sexual act."

"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."

"Being young is an eighteen-year prison sentence for a crime your parents committed. But you do get time off for good behavior."

"War triggers human inventiveness at the most brilliant, because if you don't win your wars, your civilization disappears."

"In war planning, you must anticipate the actions of the enemy. Be careful lest your preventive measures teach the enemy which of his possible actions you most fear."

"While war is the ultimate expression of mistrust, it cannot be waged without absolute trust. A soldier trusts his comrades to stand beside him and his commander to lead him wisely, so that he will not be led to a meaningless death. And the commander trusts his subordinates and soldiers to act with wisdom and courage in order to compensate for his own ignorance, stupidity, incompetence, and fear, which all commanders possess in ample measure."

"Only a fool thinks the turns of history can be measured by any standard other than which wars were fought, and who won them. Survival of the fittest—that’s the measure of a civilization. And survival is determined on a battlefield. Where one man kills another, or dies, or runs away. The society whose citizens will stand and fight is the one with the best chance for history even to notice it."

"Treason only matters when it is committed by trusted men."

"There are hard wars and easy wars. It's easy to conquer a country whose people hate their own government more than they hate the invaders. It's hard to fight a war when your army knows that back home, their families are rooting for the other side."

"Heroic love is to do what is best for the loved one, disregarding desire, trust, and cost. Unfortunately, it is impossible to know what is best for anyone."

"When do you first set foot on the ladder to greatness? Or on the slippery slope of treason? Do you know it at the time? Or do you discover it only looking back?"

"Protect your own force—that was a prime concern. But if it were the only priority, or the highest priority, nations would keep their armies at home and never commit them to battle at all."

"If you tell the same lies long enough and loudly enough, even people who know better will despair and concede the point. We are tribal animals. We cannot long stand against the tribe."

"The best thing about the future was that it was unknown. Cassandra’s one good quality was that she was never believed."

"He saw that he had committed the prime sin against survival: He had indulged in wishful thinking."

"If heredity were not overwhelmingly more important than environment, you could teach calculus to a horse."

"The historicity of Jesus is the slipperiest question in all history because for centuries the question couldn’t be raised. They would hang you for asking — or burn you at the stake."

"I see no use in written marriage contracts; they can’t be enforced...whereas if the partners want to make it work, no written instrument is necessary."

"Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get."