« Edwin Brewster had the answer to everything, and questioned with authority the nonsense I heard on Sundays at the church, where my mother dragged me. Thus, life was not the work of God, but of the division of cells. The brain was an intelligent machine that was built brick by brick as a child, studying at school. Living beings were machines that, by the greatest of mysteries, reached their final form according to an invisible plane. A first peony cell divided, over and over, millions of times, and became a mature flower. An Ethel Stoney egg fertilized in India by Julius Mathison Turing became Alan Turing. The bricks of life piled up, combined, collaborated in a perfect mechanism to form a man, the most complex and disruptive of the machines at work on the surface of the globe. »

« From an early age, those who crossed my path thought I was crazy. I was an ugly duckling, unable to assimilate the most mundane social conventions. Every middle-class Englishman had to look like a gentleman. For my great misfortune, I had the manners of a farm boy. I was accused of being in the moon, badly dressed, covered with ink stains. My hair was still in battle and my nails were too long. I was not in the mould, and my chronic inability to get along with children my age did not help my reputation as an asylum seeker. I learned to read alone to break my loneliness. By the age of five, I was already bored with other people's conversations and interests. I was killing time by playing chess against myself and reading any book that fell into my hands. »

« The 20th century was the perfect moment when two extreme visions opposed each other in this regard, each having had dramatic consequences. On the one hand, communism is based on the idea that Man is above all culture and seeking to deny the natural part of the individual. If everything is cultural, it is indeed possible to re-educate Man, to make him better even against his will. On the other side of the ideological spectrum, the fascist vision believes above all in the strength of the innate. Nothing can by definition lower the upper race, nor save the lower race, the logical consequence being the unconditional exaltation of the former and the monstrous and cold elimination of the latter. »