
We ... make the modern error of dignifying the Individual.  We do everything
we can to butter him up.  We give him a name, assure him that he has certain
inalienable rights, educate him, let him pass on his name to his brats and
when he dies we give him a special hole in the ground ... But after all, he's
only  a seed, a bloom and a withering stalk among pressing billions.  Your
Individual is a pretty disgusting, vain, lewd little bastard ... By God,
he has only one right guaranteed him in Nature, and that is the right to die
and stink to Heaven.
		-- Ross Lockridge, quoted in "Short Lives" by Katinka Matson
