— You're nice. You aren't like the rest of them. I like you very much...— I've done nothing to deserve that.— One doesn't have to do anything to deserve that...

They died... Have you ever seen a baby elephant lying on its side, with its trunk inert, gazing at you with eyes in which there seem to have taken refuge all those so highly praised human qualities of which humanity is so largely devoid?

It was obviously a typical human enterprise, very much of this earth, with nothing true or sincere about it, and doomed irremediably to the usual exploitations and treachery...

Morel is afflicted with too noble a conception of man. He demands too much of human beings, and he refiLses to compromise. You can’t live with that inside you. It becomes almost a question of physiology. What he calls for is not even moral progress; it's really a biological mutation. He can’t accept the very biological limitations which make us what we are — weak, crawling in our mud, and totally devoid of dignity. That's the iron law he’s protesting, the law he refuses to submit to.

...misanthropy, hatred of mankind, is the order of the day.

On the whole, people are beginning to understand. Any fellow who's known war, fear, who thinks of his children and of the hydrogen tests, and of political oppression, is beginning to understand that the protection of nature concerns him directly. . .

After all, we emerged from the mud some millions of years ago, and although we got rid of our scales, there is still a long way to go before we become really human — but one of these days we shall triumph over our limitations, over the harsh biological law which has been imposed upon us. Our friend was right: it’s an inhuman law, and it’s high time to change it.Then all that will be left of the infirmity and the challenge of being a man will be one more cast skin by the side of our track.

It wasn't true, the evidence was faked, but the odd thing is that, whether it s true or not, the consequences are the same: one large group of human beings or another turned out to be triple-distilled sons-of-bitches, which proves that we all have it in us. Whether the Communists staged a diabolical lie or the Americans sowed plague in China, the one thing that matters is that, as a man, you're in the gutter, Colonel Babcock.