quotes from stuff I'm reading

I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be likened unto a system of gears whose teeth have been filed off at random. Such a snaggle-toothed machine, driven by a standard or even a substandard libido, whirls with a jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell.

The boss G-man concluded wrongly that there were no teeth on the gears in the mind of Jones. "You're completely crazy," he said.

Jones wasn't completely crazy. The dismaying thing about the classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined.

Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell - keeping perfect time for eight minutes and thirty-three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year.

The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases.

The willful filing off of gear teeth, the willful doing without certain pieces of information - 

 That was how a household as contradictory as one composed of Jones, Father Keeley, Vice-Bundesfuehrer Krapptauer, and the Black Fuehrer could exist in relative harmony -

That was how my father-in-law could contain in one mind an indifference toward slave women and love for a blue vase - 

That was how Rudolf Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz, could alternate over the loudspeakers of Auschwitz great music and calls for corpse-carriers - 

That was how Nazi Germany could sense no important differences between civilization and hydrophobia - 

That is the closes I can come to explaining the legions, the nations of lunatics I've seen in my time... Since there is no one else to praise me, I will praise myself - will say that I have never tampered with a single tooth in my thought machine, such as it is. There are teeth missing, God knows - some I was born without, teeth that will never grow. And other teeth have been stripped by the clutchless shifts of history - 

But never have I willfully destroyed a tooth on a gear of my thinking machine. Never have I said to myself, "This fact I can do without."

 Vonnegut's Mother Night