There is a pleasure sure, In being mad, that none but madmen know!
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when theyare right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else.Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.
Where do you get your taste in authorsThat damned library of yours! (He indicates the small bookcase at rear.) Voltaire, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Ibsen! Atheists, fools, and madmen! And your poets! This Dowson, and this Baudelaire, and Swinburne and O'Neill Oscar Wilde, and Whitman and Poe! Whoremongers and degenerates! Pah! When I've three good sets of Shakespeare there (he nods at the large bookcase) you could read.
The worst of madmen is a saint run mad.
They were madmen, but they had in them that little flame which never dies.