Addiction is characteristic of modernity. Intoxication served to buffer the shock of the modern. Beginning in the nineteenth century, a narcotic (via a tricking-of-the-senses as to what reality is by new cinema technologies) was made out of reality itself.

Addiction is having every habit lying there in one's body even after quitting - having them lying dormant like flowers in the desert, ready to burst into full and luxuriant bloom if given the right conditions.

Addiction is an attachment to the phallus as a means to obtain satisfaction by somehow avoiding the law or the passage through the social bond.

Addiction's opposite is not sobriety; it is human connection.

Complacency is easy when it is not ourselves being injured — It makes a difference whose ox is gored.

Complacency is the death of excellence

Complacency is the enemy of progress.

Complacency is the death of success. Nothing wilts faster than laurels that have been rested on.

Conflict is not possible without communication.

Conflict is avoided most on account of mutual respect.

Conflict is inevitable but not necessarily bad.

Conflict is the force that drives a theatrical writer.

Corruption is strong friendship at the highest level.

Corruption is not the result of power, rather power attracts the corruptible.

Corruption is a quality of men who possess a refined cruelty - witty and slanderous. Such men know types of murder that require neither daggers nor assault.

Corruption is the warlike passions transmuted into countless private passions. as such, it is precisely in times of corruption and 'exhaustion (i.e. times when tragedy runs through houses and streets) that great love and great hatred are born and that the flame of knowledge flares up into the sky.