It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.
…an optimistic mind-set finds dozens of possible solutions for every problem that the pessimist regards as incurable.
…when dogma enters the brain, all intellectual activity ceases.
We look for the Secret – the Philosopher’s Stone, the Elixir of the Wise, Supreme Enlightenment, ‘God’ or whatever…and all the time it is carrying us about…It is the human nervous system itself.
The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization.
Whenever people are certain they understand our peculiar situation here on this planet, it is because they have accepted a religious Faith or a secular Ideology (Ideologies are the modern form of Faiths) and just stopped thinking.
I’m sorry There are some jokes you cannot understand until you have been a fool many, many years and thought yourself finally cured and then found out that you had just become a different kind of fool.
Having a spine is overrated. If everybody squealed and ran away, there’d be no more wars.
Belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence.
Horror is the natural reaction to the last 5,000 years of history.
How do you get free of the damnable books of Romance when everybody else is still living in them?
The future is up for grabs. It belongs to any and all who will take the risk and accept the responsibility of consciously creating the future they want.
Mystics are all a bit funny in the head anyway,” the priest added cynically, “which is why the church locks them all up in mental hospitals and euphemistically calls these institutions monasteries.
The normal is that which nobody quite is. If you listen to seemingly dull people very closely, you’ll see that they’re all mad in different and interesting ways, and are merely struggling to hide it.
There are gods, but there is no God; and all gods become devils eventually.
The Right’s view of government and the Left’s view of big business are both correct.
Every war results from the struggle for markets and spheres of influence, and every war is sold to the public by professional liars and totally sincere religious maniacs, as a Holy Crusade to save God and Goodness from Satan and Evil.
A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of monopoly in the means of production.
Size is not a reality, but a construct of the mind; and space a construct to contain constructs.
The longer one is alone, the easier it is to hear the song of the earth.