Quotes from Ray Russell

Beelzebub is the name of Lucifer's lieutenant. The name Beelzebub, in Hebrew, means Lord of the Flies.

To paraphrase the late Christopher Hitchens, religion was mankind's first and therefore worst tool for understanding the world. Yet for all that

If a man can be corrupted by a few books, I doubt if there was anything there to begin with.

You shudder deliciously. It becomes you.

Was this humanity? Was this nobility? Was this the Christian glory that presumed to hold itself above the heathen Turk? To suffer innocents be sacrificed on an altar of corruption, merely that a lofty family be spared discomfiture? Oh, this was tenfold more abominable than the crime itself, that high authority should wink at it!

But as I sat in that bed, the book in my hands, the city outside silent, I had reason to feel as if a hand from some sub-zero hell had reached up and laid itself-oh, very gently-upon my heart.

Inhuman, saith I? Nay: the beasts of the field and forest, lacking all humanity, e'en the most terrible among these, slay not by long deliberate slaying and for lust. Human, then, indeed, were those fell crimes.

I believe it is entirely possible for a man to possess not a single one of the virtues, to be a demon in human flesh.

Now, the story makes no reference to specific years—it uses that eighteen-followed-by-a-dash business which writers were so fond of in those days, I've never understood why

belief does not depend upon logic, it is a delicate and fragile flower that draws nourishment from intuition and instinct and hunch.

A great boob he is to pit himself against a holy Father and a bishop of the Church, with the very House of God next door. The nerve of him!

offer you a veritable Oriental paradise of unlimited raptures!" He

Man is an indolent creature, but light the fire of fear under him, and of what miracles is he not capable.

In our youth we sow wild oats; in our dotage we reap pills.

Death is a kind of nakedness, a kind of indecency, a kind of faux pas. Unless we have known the dead person well enough to experience true loss, or unless we have wronged the dead person enough to experience guilt, the only emotion we can experience is embarrassment.