“Men are a race of monkeys. All of them, David. A few among them now and then who have the genius to create. Freaks. The apes harry them to death, then they follow them. They are no less apes because they steal and follow. Take from the annals of man the deposits of the lonely exceptions and they’d go groveling and dumb, as they did five hundred thousand years ago. Do not admire men, David. Admire the wondrous diseased and solitary freak who at times is born among them, who rises above them: who has given to the monkey-clan all the stolen toys they clutter their lives with. Paper seems a miracle to you. That is sheer ignorance: sentimentalism, if you will, which is the same. Look what the monkeys do with this paper: how they degrade and defile what the creators of paper destined for the recording of holy words. You can give a monkey a jewel, but he’ll hide it in his refuse, or he’ll decorate some obscene portion of his body with it. Is that not just what has taken place with the jewels of intelligence and genius? The plow is a miracle. But the average plowman is a slave who has debased both plow and soil. What has he done with the sacrament of the harvest? He has let his soil that should be to him as the woman he loves be stolen from him: he works it for hire: he sells its fecundity to ugly masters. The lot of women is a lovely thing. But how do women conceive? What do they do with their children? You marvel at language. What do you think of what men say? No, David: yours is an old sentimental fault. Through the ages great lonely spirits have worked for good: they found the uses of fire, they invented the wheel and the sail, the arrow and the lever. The swarms from whom they differed as gods from maggots took their generous gifts and turned them against life. Much of the march of civilization is the abject record of just this bitter process. The dull creature who drives your cab--how is he related to the hero that tamed the shaggy stallions of the Stone Age? or to the poet that dreamed The Wheel? Would the priest whose ecstasy brought forth fire be the friend of the janitor downstairs who tends my furnace--or of the filthy fool that cooks my dinner? What relationship beyond that joining the parts of a colossal joke binds the prophet who first pressed papyrus and the degenerate editor who buys his paper by the ton, dirties it with his lies and sells it to the herd for three cents each morning? Or binds a Shakespeare with the geese that have been quacking about him ever since he died? You have no right to admire the debased relics of greatness--their parodies. To do so is to do precisely the opposite of what you think: to flout the spirit that alone deserves your wonder. Look what the world of men has done. They have so perverted the gifts of the great that no free man can longer partake of them. Their vileness has a monopoly in the fruits of genius.” “I can’t feel that.”