Nothing is more useless in developing a nations economy than a gun, and nothing blocks the road to social development more than the financial burden of war. War is the arch enemy of national progress and the modern scourge of civilized men. – King Hussein I

The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists, reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai. – J. G. Ballard