Reason Is Simply A Vast Tautology.

Despair ... Is Like A Gas, Odourless, Tasteless, Without Nourishment. You Breathe It In, Your Limbs Relax, You Cease To Care, Even At The Moment When The Steel Touches Your Throat.

Nothing Is Worse Than What We Can Imagine.

Sleep Is No Longer A Healing Bath, A Recuperation Of Vital Forces, But An Oblivion, A Nightly Brush With Annihilation.

Erasmus Dramatizes A Well-established Political Position: That Of The Fool Who Claims License To Criticize All And Sundry Without Reprisal, Since His Madness Defines Him As Not Fully A Person And Therefore Not A Political Being With Political Desires And Ambitions. The Praise Of Folly, Therefore Sketches The Possibility Of A Position For The Critic Of The Scene Of Political Rivalry, A Position Not Simply Impartial Between The Rivals But Also, By Self-definition, Off The Stage Of Rivalry Altogether.

Belief May Be No More, In The End, Than A Source Of Energy, Like A Battery Which One Clips Into An Idea To Make It Run.