Written in 1966

"Among the outstandingly distinguishable aspects of our civilization is a belief (practiced rather than expressed) that security from suffering is worth any price, and specifically that those goods, whose values it is impossible to measure but which are unavailable without pain, are the inventions of maniacs or a residual superstition." --
Leszek Kolakowski, The Presence of Myth (in Chapter 9, "Myth in the Culture of Analgesics"), translated into English by Adam Czerniawski, published in 1988