All phenomena are directly or indirectly related to the number five, and this relationship can always be demonstrated, given enough ingenuity on the part of the demonstrator.

You have to face it, Joe. God is a crazy woman.

That’s the nature of logical thought. All propositions are true in some sense, false in some sense and meaningless in some sense.

This bolshie in Russia, Lenin, he has ordered the schools to teach chess to everybody. You know why? He says that chess teaches the lesson that revolutionaries must learn: that if you don’t mobilize your forces properly, you lose. No matter how high your morality, no matter how lofty your goal: fight without mercy, use every ounce of intelligence, or you lose.

It’s a dreadfully long monster of a book. The authors are utterly incompetent—no sense of style or structure at all. It starts out as a detective story, switches to science-fiction, then goes off into the supernatural, and is full of the most detailed information of dozens of ghastly boring subjects. And the time sequence is all out of order in a very pretentious imitation of Faulkner and Joyce. Worst yet, it has the most raunchy sex scenes, thrown in just to make it sell, and the authors have the supreme bad taste to introduce real political figures into this mishmash and pretend to be exposing a real conspiracy.