Authors

"Thrice happy time, Best portion of the various year, in which Nature rejoiceth, smiling on her works Lovely, to full perception wrought!"

"Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen."

"Lord!" he said, "when you sell a man a book you don't sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue — you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night — there's all heaven and earth in a book, a real book I mean. Jiminy! If I were the baker or the butcher or the broom huckster, people would run to the gate when I came by — just waiting for my stuff. And here I go loaded with everlasting salvation — yes, ma'am, salvation for their little, stunted minds — and it's hard to make 'em see it. That's what makes it worth while — I'm doing something that nobody else from Nazareth, Maine, to Walla Walla, Washington, has ever thought of. It's a new field, but by the bones of Whitman, it's worth while. That's what this country needs — more books!"

"It's a good thing to turn your mind upside down now and then, like an hour-glass, to let the particles run the other way."

"Printer's ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years. Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries."

"The most interesting persons are always those who have nothing special to do: children, nurses, policemen and actors at 11 o'clock in the morning."

"Philadelphia was the first city to foresee the advantages of a Federal constitution and oatmeal as a breakfast food."

"We visit bookshops not so often to buy any one special book, but rather to rediscover, in the happier and more expressive words of others, our own encumbered soul."

"My theology, briefly, Is that the Universe Was Dictated But not Signed."

"Happiness is surely the best teacher of good manners: only the unhappy are churlish in deportment."

"There is only one success … to be able to spend your life in your own way."

""Poetry," said Shelley, "lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar." This, if you substitute 'absurdity' for 'beauty,' is also a good definition of humour. Mr. Chaplin has made the most familiar objects in the world—elderly shoes and trousers—something exceedingly rich and strange. Humour is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in every-day affairs."

"Life is a foreign language: all men mispronounce it."

"Why do they put the Gideon Bibles only in the bedrooms, where it's usually too late, and not in the barroom downstairs?"

"April prepares her green traffic light and the world thinks Go."

"They had half a mind to refuse me a passage."

"The premise of Wikipedia is that continuous improvement will lead to perfection, that premise is completely unproven…with many of the pieces you don't know who it's written by, and who the administrators are…one of the administrators overseeing the political coverage openly encourages people to vote for John Kerry…30,000 articles were created by a bot [an automated program that goes round causing havoc]…hyperlinks, bulletpoints and cut-and-paste press releases do not an encyclopedia entry make."

"synergizing progress is the notion to be maximized ..."

"There is a spiritual obligation, there is a task to be done. It is not, however, something as simple as following a set of somebody else's rules. The noetic enterprise is a primary obligation toward being. Our salvation is linked to it. Not everyone has to read alchemical texts or study superconducting biomolecules to make the transition. Most people make it naively by thinking clearly about the present at hand, but we intellectuals are trapped in a world of too much information. Innocence is gone for us. We cannot expect to cross the rainbow bridge through a good act of contrition; that will not be sufficient. We have to understand. Whitehead said, "Understanding is the apperception of pattern as such"; to fear death is to misunderstand life. Cognitive activity is the defining act of humanness. Language, thought, analysis, art, dance, poetry, mythmaking: these are the things that point the way toward the realm of the eschaton. We humans may be released into a realm of pure self-engineering. The imagination is everything. This was Blake's perception. This is where we came from. This is where we are going. And it is only to be approached through cognitive activity."

"The alternative physics is a physics of light. Light is composed of photons, which have no antiparticle. This means that there is no dualism in the world of light. The conventions of relativity say that time slows down as one approaches the speed of light, but if one tries to imagine the point of view of a thing made of light, one must realize that what is never mentioned is that if one moves at the speed of light there is no time whatsoever. There is an experience of time zero. … The only experience of time that one can have is of a subjective time that is created by one's own mental processes, but in relationship to the Newtonian universe there is no time whatsoever. One exists in eternity, one has become eternal, the universe is aging at a staggering rate all around one in this situation, but that is perceived as a fact of this universe — the way we perceive Newtonian physics as a fact of this universe. One has transited into the eternal mode. One is then apart from the moving image; one exists in the completion of eternity."

"What we call imagination is actually the universal library of what’s real. You couldn’t imagine it if it weren’t real somewhere, sometime."

"History is a set of nested resonances with each epoch being shorter than the one that preceded it. This event horizon is like a series of ghost horizons, and once you enter into history, you enter into the outer shell of the temporal field of the attractor or the concrescence."

"I've been thinking like this since 1968, talking about it like this since 1980, but I never knew what... how it would come or what it would be. In the last few years, with the rise of a technological, a cultural artefact like the internet, I now see how it will make its way into the world. We are building the nervous system of the human oversoul. We are individual units operating under social rules that are pushing us ever closer toward dissolving our societies... societies—human groups run by rules—into telepathic collectivities of some sort. ... We have come to the end of our sojourn in matter. We have come to the end of our separateness."

"For approximately 500 years [science's] argument for its pre-eminence was that it could create beautiful toys: aircraft, railroads, global economies, television, spacecraft. But that is a fool’s argument for truth! I mean, that’s after all how a medicine show operates, you know: the juggler is so good, the medicine must be even better! This is not an entirely rational way to proceed."

"We are being sucked into the body of eternity."

"My notion of what the psychedelic experience is, for us, that we each must become like fishermen, and go out on to the dark ocean of mind, and let our nets down into that sea. And what you're after is not some behemoth, that will tear through your nets, follow them and drag you in your little boat, you know, into the abyss, nor are what we're looking for a bunch of sardines that can slip through your net and disappear. Ideas like, "Have you ever noticed that your little finger exactly fits your nostril?", and stuff like that. What we are looking for are middle-size ideas, that are not so small that they are trivial, and not so large that they're incomprehensible. Middle-size ideas we can wrestle into our boat and take back to the folks on shore, and have fish dinner. And every one of us when we go into the psychedelic state, this is what we should be looking for. It's not for your elucidation, it's not part of your self-directed psychotherapy. You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is in danger by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness. And so to whatever degree any one of us can bring back a small piece of the picture and contribute it to the building of the new paradigm, then we participate in the redemption of the human spirit, and that after all is what it's really all about."

"It is now very clear that techniques of machine-human interfacing, pharmacology of the synthetic variety, all kinds of manipulative techniques, all kinds of data storage, imaging and retrieval techniques– all of this is coalescing toward the potential of a truly demonic or angelic kind of self-imaging of our culture... And the people who are on the demonic side are fully aware of this and hurrying full-tilt forward with their plans to capture everyone as a 100% believing consumer inside some kind of a beige furnished fascism that won't even raise a ripple."

"The Beliefs of a Witoto shaman and the beliefs of a Princeton phenomenologist have an equal chance of being correct, and there are no arbiters of who is right. Here is something we have not assimilated. We have been to the moon, we have charted the depths of the ocean and the heart of the atom, but we have a fear of looking inward to ourselves because we sense that is where all the contradictions flow together."

"Novelty is density of connection. ... We are in the grip of some kind of an attractor, and when we look back at history, we can have a sense, I think, that we have never been here before. But we are so accustomed to causal thought, that we assume we have been pushed here, pushed here by historical necessity, by bad political decisions, by the vicissitudes of evolution (cultural and otherwise). I don’t think so. I think we have been pulled here, that we are under the aegis of a kind of an attractor. Some people would call it a “destiny”, but what it is is a dream that is pulling us deeper and deeper into the adventure of existential becoming. And faster and faster—that’s the other thing. Deeper and deeper, faster and faster, so that the rate of change that people were accustomed to before the Industrial Revolution, for example—we can barely conceive of such slow-moving, stately, meta-stable societies. On the other hand, within the 20th Century, the acceleration has been even more intense, and continues to accelerate."

"First of all, why a descent into novelty rather than an ascent? It was my thing to do as I wanted to do it, and it seemed to me—the way I thought of time was I thought of it like a river. And so I thought of it as flowing toward its lowest level. And I thought of history as a river and Eternity as the ocean. So naturally history flows downhill to reach Eternity. I also like the fact that when the descent in elevation is rapid, the river runs faster, and when the landscape is almost flat, the river broadens out and meanders. So it was to preserve this idea of time as a fluid. The other reason is a mathematical reason. It has to do with the fact that if we have novelty moving downward, then the maximum of novelty is zero."

"It's pretty simple, the ethical life - it's just demanding . . . The moral life does not consist of wheat grass diet, or affirmation, or any of that. The moral life is - unless you're at Esalen - you should clothe the naked, you should feed the hungry, comfort the afflicted, bury the dead, and there are a couple others - obvious - things to be done. It's not about how many prostrations you do, or what lineage you've associated yourself with, or how much cholesterol is in your diet. And somehow we have confused the ethical and moral dimension with the dimension of physical practices - probably because we have been too infected by the memes of tired Asian religions that long ago gave up moral philosophy in favor of rotational activity - because the social problems of Asia are overwhelming - that's a response to an overwhelming human tragedy - the quietude of Asian religion, I think."

"Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience that primordial shamanism is based on is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego."

"A lot of people pass through the thinking I'm a guru and take enough trips to understand that no, I was just a witness. I was just a witness."

"I remember the very, very first time that I smoked DMT. It was sort of a benchmark, you might say, and I remember that this friend of mine that always got there first visited me with this little glass pipe and this stuff which looked like orange mothballs. And since I was a graduate of Dr. Hofmann's, I figured there were no surprises. So the only question I asked is, 'How long does it last?' and he said, 'About five minutes.' So I did it and... [long pause, audience cheers] there was a something, like a flower, like a chrysanthemum in orange and yellow that was sort of spinning, spinning, and then it was like I was pushed from behind and I fell through the chrysanthemum into another place that didn't seem like a state of mind, it seemed like another place. And what was going on in this place aside from the tastefully soffited indirect lighting, and the crawling geometric hallucinations along the domed walls, what was happening was that there were a lot of ahh.. beings in there, what I call self-transforming machine elves. Sort of like jewelled basketballs all dribbling their way toward me. And if they'd had faces they would have been grinning, but they didn't have faces. And they assured me that they loved me and they told me not to be amazed; not to give way to astonishment. And so I watched them, even though I wondered if maybe I hadn't really done it this time, and what they were doing was they were making objects come into existence by singing them into existence. Objects which looked like Fabergé eggs from Mars morphing themselves with Mandaean alphabetical structures. They looked like the concrescence of linguistic intentionality put through a kind of hyper-dimensional transform into three-dimensional space. And these little machines offered themselves to me. And I realized when I looked at them that if I could bring just one of these little trinkets back, nothing would ever be quite the same again. And I wondered, Where Am I? And What Is Going On? It occurred to me that these must be holographic viral projections from an autonomous continuum that was somehow intersecting my own, and then I thought a more elegant explaination would be to take it at face value and realize that I had broken into an ecology of souls. And that somehow I was getting a peek over the other side. Somehow I was finding out that thing that you cheerfully assume you can't find out. But it felt like I was finding out. And it felt.. and then I can't remember what it felt like because the little self-transforming tykes interrupted me and said, "Don't think about it. Don't think about who we are... Think about doing what we're doing. Do it! Do it! DO IT NOW!!!" And what they meant was use your voice to make an object. And as I understood, I felt a bubble kind of grow inside of me. And I watched these little elf tykes jumping in and out of my chest; they like to do that to reassure you. And they said, "Do it." And I felt language rise up in me that was unhooked from english, and I began to speak..."

"The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made of you can make of it whatever you wish."

"The view of science is that all processes ultimately run down, but entropy is maximized only in some far, far away future. The idea of entropy makes an assumption that the laws of the space-time continuum are infinitely and linearly extendable into the future. In the spiral time scheme of the timewave this assumption is not made. Rather, final time means passing out of one set of laws that are conditioning existence and into another radically different set of laws. The universe is seen as a series of compartmentalized eras or epochs whose laws are quite different from one another, with transitions from one epoch to another occurring with unexpected suddenness."

"Progress of human civilization in the area of defining human freedom is not made from the top down. No king, no parliament, no government ever extended to the people more rights than the people insisted upon. And I think we've come to a place with this psychedelic issue. And we have the gay community as a model, and all the other communities, the ethnic communities. We simply have to say, Look: LSD has been around for fifty years now, we just celebrated the birthday. It ain't going away. WE are not going away. We are not slack-jawed, dazed, glazed, unemployable psychotic creeps. We are pillars of society. You can't run your computers, your fashion houses, your publishing houses, your damn magazines, you can't do anything in culture without psychedelic people in key positions. And this is the great unspoken truth of American Creativity. So I think it's basically time to just come out of the closet and go, "You know what, I'm stoned, and I'm proud.""

"If the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed."

"We are caged by our cultural programming. Culture is a mass hallucination, and when you step outside the mass hallucination you see it for what it's worth."

"I'm not trying to sign people up to a creed, I'm much more interested in the people that disagree. These ideas are powerful but this isn't mysticism in the ordinary sense to be protected by mumblings about faith and all that. This is the real thing."

"For some reason, a balkanization of epistemology is taking place. And what I mean by that is: there is no longer a commonality of understanding. I mean, for some people quantum physics provides the answers. Their next door neighbors may look to the channeling of archangels with equal fervor. … It is accompanied by a related phenomenon which is technology, or the historical momentum of things, is creating such a bewildering social milieu that the monkey mind cannot find a simple story, a simple creation myth or redemption myth to lay over the crazy contradictory patchwork of profane techno-consumerist post-McLuhanist electronic pre-apocalyptics existence. And so into that dimension of anxiety created by this inability to parse reality rushes a bewildering variety of squirrelly notions, epistemological cartoons if you will. … Conspiracy theory, in my humble opinion … is a kind of epistemological cartoon about reality. I mean, isn't it so simple to believe that things are run by the greys, and that all we have to do is trade sufficient fetal tissue to them and then we can solve our technological problems, or isn't it comforting to believe that the Jews are behind everything, or the Communist Party, or the Catholic Church, or the Masons. Well, these are epistemological cartoons, you know, it is kindergarten in the art of amateur historiography. I believe that the truth of the matter is far more terrifying, that the real truth that dare not speak itself, is that no one is in control, absolutely no one.… Nobody is in control. This stuff is ruled by the equations of dynamics and chaos. Now, there may be entities seeking control — the World Bank, the Communist Party, the rich, the somebody-or-others — but to seek control is to take enormous aggravation upon yourself. … Because this process which is underway will take the control-freak by the short and curly and throw them against the wall. It's like trying to control a dream, you see. The global destiny of the species is somehow unfolding with the logic of a dream."

"What you see, I think is the morphogenetic field. The invisible world that holds everything together. Not the net of matter and light, but the net of casuistry — of intentionality, of caring, of hope of dream — of thought. That all is there, but it has been hidden from us for centuries because of the exorcism of the spirit that took place in order to allow science to do business. And that monotonous and ill-considered choice has made us the inheritors of a tradition of existential emptiness — but that has impalded to us to go back to the jungles and recover this thing. … The question is, can we dream a dream that is sufficiently noble that we give meaning to the sacrifices that have been made to allow the 20th century to exist … I am convinced that if there were no shamanic pipeline, there would be no higher life, as we know it, on this planet. … We are all cells of a much larger body, and like the cells of our own body it is hard for us to glimpse the whole pattern of the whole of what is happening, and yet we can sense that there is a purpose, and there is a pattern..."

"We have to stop CONSUMING our culture. We have to CREATE culture. DON'T watch TV, DON'T read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your OWN roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are — NOW — is the most immediate sector of your universe. And if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered. You're giving it all away to ICONS. Icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that, you want to dress like X or have lips like Y... This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion. What is real is you, and your friends, your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And, we are told No, you're unimportant, you're peripheral — get a degree, get a job, get a this, get that, and then you're a player. You don't even want to play that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world."

"I think that people don't understand. As the Firesign Theater used to say, 'Everything you know is wrong.' But that is a very liberating understanding, because if everything you know is wrong, then all the problems you thought were insoluble can be framed differently. And there's a way to take the world apart and put it back unrecognizably. We don't really understand what consciousness is at the really deep levels. With some of the tryptamine hallucinogens, you see into possibilities where questions like, 'are you alive?' 'are you dead?' 'are you you?' seem to have been transcended. I think people have a very narrow conception of what is possible with reality, that we're surrounded by the howling abyss of the unknowable and nobody knows what's out there."

"Because the fact is, what blinds us to the presence of alien intelligence is linguistic and cultural bias operating on ourselves. The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world, you see. We operate on a very narrow slice based on cultural conventions. So the important thing, if synergizing progress is the notion to be maximized (and I think it's the notion to be maximized), is to try and locate the blind spot in the culture — the place where the culture isn't looking, because it dare not — because if it were to look there, its previous values would dissolve, you see. For Western Civilization that place is the psychedelic experience as it emerges out of nature."

"Thinkers are not a welcome addition to most social situations."

"What blinds us, or what makes historical progress very difficult, is our lack of awareness of our ignorance. And [I think] that beliefs should be put aside, and that a psychedelic society would abandon belief systems [in favor of] direct experience and this is, I think much, of the problem of the modern dilemma, is that direct experience has been discounted and in its place all kind of belief systems have been erected... If you believe something, you're automatically precluded from believing in the opposite, which means that a degree of your human freedom has been forfeited in the act of this belief."

"Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves, and what is lacking is the clear vision of what should be done... What needs to be done is that fundamental, ontological conceptions of reality need to be redone. We need a new language, and to have a new language we must have a new reality... A new reality will generate a new language, a new language will fix a new reality, and make it part of this reality."

"I believe that liberation, or let's even say, decency as a human quality, is an actual resonance and anticipation of this future perfected state of humanity. We can will the perfect future into being by becoming microcosms of the perfect future, and no longer casting blame outward on institutions or hierarchies of responsibility and control, but by realizing the opportunities here, the responsibilities here, and the two may never be congruent again, and the salvation of your immortal soul may depend on what you do with the opportunity."

"Orient yourself towards the psychedelic experience, towards the psychedelic phenomenon, as a source of information. A mirror image of the psychedelic experience in hardware are computer networks. Computer networks, paradoxically enough, are a deeply feminizing influence on society, where, in hardware, the unconscious is actually being created. It's as though we took the Platonic bon mot about how "if God did not exist, Man would invent him", and say "if the unconscious does not exist, humanity will invent it" — in the form of these vast networks able to transfer and transform information. This is in fact what we are caught up in, is a transforming of information. We have not physically changed in the last 40,000 years; the human type was established at the end of the last glaciation. But change, which was previously operable in the biological realm, is now operable in the realm of culture."

"Because too much we have lived in the light of the idea that your ideology will be dictated to you essentially by geography! And if you're born in India, you'll find out that the Cosmos is one way; if you're born in Brooklyn, you find out it's another way. What we need to do is transcend these localized grids of fate, which make us what we are but don't want to be."

"History is the in-rushing toward what the Buddhists call the realm of the densely packed, a transformational realm where the opposites are unified."

"The psychedelics are a red-hot social issue, ethical issue, whatever the term for it is, and it is precisely because they are a deconditioning agents: they will cast doubt in you if you are a Hasidic rabbi, a Marxist anthropologist, or an altar boy, because their business is to dissolve belief systems, and they do this very well and then they leave you with the raw datum of experience, what William James called in infants 'the blooming, buzzing experience.' And out of that you reconstruct the world, and you need to understand that it is a dialog where your decisions, the projection of your grammar onto the intellectual space in front of you, is going to gel into the mode of being. We actually create our own universe because we are all operating with our own private languages."

"We have numerous, extremely naïve assumptions built into our thinking, and our most venerable explanatory engines, such as science, happen also to be our oldest explanatory engines, and therefore they have built into them the most naïve and unexamined assumptions."

"Yet science is going to tell you that the only things worth describing are those phenomena that can be repeatedly triggered. This is being these are the only phenomena that science can describe and that's the name of the game as far as they are concerned. But we, to claim our freedom, to take advantage of the tiny moment between immense abysses of unknowability, perhaps death, perhaps other reincarnations, perhaps transitions into other life forms, these things we don't know, but in the moment of being human we have the unique opportunity to figure things out. And I have the faith that it is possible, sometime, somewhere, to have a conversation, perhaps no progress will be made until the ninth hour, but to have a conversation in which reality could be literally pulled to pieces, beyond the point of reconstructing."

"We have to claim anarchy and realize that systems have a life of their own that is anti-humanist. There is definitely an anti-humanist tendency in all systems."

"We must begin to send out ideological visions rather than be the consumers of them. We need to turn off the metaphorical televisions which are hooking us into the network of cultural assumptions dictated from the Pentagon and Madison Avenue and what-have-you. We need, instead, to turn on our terminals, and to begin to interact with like-minded people throughout the world and establish this new intellectual order, which will be then the salvation of mankind, I firmly believe– because it is a collectivity, and people will then feel the interrelatedness of their fates, feel the interrelatedness as a thing which transcends national divisions, ideological divisions, feel the primacy of being part of the human family."

"I think we have to have character models built of ourselves, and turn the whole thing over to our writers; and we'll just go off to Tahiti, and the writers can — it's the "Uncle Duke" solution. If you can turn yourself into a cartoon character, you can retire, and a whole team of people will keep you au courant. … You know, I think the only way to keep your career going is to retire the "bod", and create an online character– a Saturday morning cartoon show apparently is where the action is."

"It's strange — you know, the Net is denounced as austere, the product of the engineering mentality, so forth and so on. It's the most feminine influence that Western civilization has ever allowed itself to fall under the spell of. The troubadors of the fourteenth century were as nothing compared to the boundary-dissolving, feminizing, permitting, nurturing nature of the Net. Maybe that's why there is an overwhelming male preference for it, in its early form, because that's where that was needed. But it is Sophia, it is wisdom, it is the penetrating archetypal female logos of the world-soul, leading us away from what was very sharp-edged and uncomfortable and repressive to our creativity and our sexuality and our relationships to each other and to the Earth."

"Virtual reality is a fairly new concept to us; but once you grok it, it seems clear that any civilization that was capable of starflight and longevity extension, and so forth and so on, would also have a full VR toolkit under control. Well then, that means that when we go looking for the extraterrestrial, what will be the footprint? Perhaps vanished races are all around us, but downloaded into solid-state matrices that we have only recently come to the point where we could even recognize that possibility."

"Mark mentioned the vector of virtual reality, nanotechnology, global communications — it's clear that we're moving toward, if not the Eschaton itself, then some kind of historical echo of it, in simulation, that, for all practical purposes, will be the same thing, as far as the impact it has on our lives. For example, you could doubt my much-vaunted prediction that the world will become unrecognizable by 2012; but do you doubt for a moment that by 2012, every major religion on Earth will have vast simulations of its eschatological vision for you to wander in and try out– so that you can look in on Nirvana.com, or lope over to the Celestial City, or look in on Sufi paradise? I mean, religious ontologies will be marketed like beers! And will be made as realistic and compelling as possible! Well then, who is to say what is real and what is not? "Real" is a distinction of a naïve mind, I think. We're getting beyond that. I mean, naïve empiricism worked well enough, until the discoveries of quantum physics seventy or eighty years ago revealed the hideous secret that the bedrock of reality is a funhouse basement!"

"Somewhere around 1945 we began to loot the future as a strategy for survival, some ethical norm was shattered."

"What's happening is that 8% of the world's people use 35% of the world's petroleum, and are ready to blow everybody off the map to keep it that way. This is nothing more than a manifestation of junkie psychology on a mass scale. We're addicted, they got it, we're happy to pay for it, but if they won't sell it we'll break into their house and take it, because by god it will go into our right arm. that's the plan."

"if we are all god's children than why have we rigged the earth with dynamite and are flipping coins to see gets to set it off"

"We've been infected with the idea of original sin, that's what keeps us infantile... Politics without responsibility IS fascism."

"The nightmare of every government on earth is a million people assembled in the town square of your capital city, demanding that you pack up to Switzerland. no body can say No to a million people on the streets."

"You need an Ego, if you didn't have an ego you wouldn't know who's mouth to put food in, when eating in a restaurant."

"People had group values, because the children were group-owned. and that made a tremendous difference in the way the society imaged it self. people lived for the group, and in the core of the group were the children, and people always put them first. So everyone identified with the children, everybody was willing to face risk to preserve the younger gene pool. This concern for male paternity is really a poisonous factor..."

"To my mind this makes psychedelics central to any political reconstruction, because these are the only force in nature that actually dissolve linguistics structures; lets the mechanics of syntax to be visible, allows the possibility for rapid introduction and spread of new concepts; gives permission for new ways of seeing; and this is what we have to do, we have to change our minds."

"The psychedelic community has not yet recognized or named itself as a community. We are well behind gays and black people and all those other mi-...we are still trying to figure out if we are a community. And if we are a community, and we have a domain of action, I think where it lies - it's not that we are all supposed to become dope dealers, it's that we are all supposed to become artists; that the transformation of culture through art is the proper understanding of what you can do with psychedelics besides blow your own mind. And I really think, you know, what we need to do is put the art-pedal to the floor, and understand that this is art - we are involved in some kind of enormous piece of performance art called Western civilization and, you know, it's been a C-minus performance so far... And they are just about to reach out with the hook and drag us offstage, unless we begin pulling rabbits out of the hat pretty furiously."

"Surely the fact that Terence McKenna says that the psilocybin mushroom 'is the megaphone used by an alien, intergalactic Other to communicate with mankind' is enough for us to wonder if taking LSD has done something to his mental faculties."

"A cyclone of unorthodox ideas capable of lifting almost any brain out of its cognitive Kansas."

"Tony Vigorito: Terence McKenna was fond of saying that the world is made of language. As a master wordsmith and a personal friend of Terence, what do you take this notion to mean? Tom Robbins: Regrettably, Terence and I never discussed this notion specifically, but my sense is that he was getting at something more profound than are the texturalists, who contend that nothing ever written matters or even exists outside of the text: the actual words an author has put down on the page. And likewise more profound than Wittgenstein, who famously said, "All I know is what I have words for." What seems likely is that Terence was not only contending that the universe is a genetic, extra-dimensional, interspecies verbal construct, but that it exists primarily as a result of our consciousness of it. What he may actually have been implying is, "the world is made of imagination." There is, after all, a possibility that when it comes to consensual reality, we're making it up. All of it. And language is the universal medium by which we identify and explain our creation to ourselves. Language lends reality to reality. I do recall hearing Terence say once that everything in nature has stories to tell; not just scientific information to impart, mind you, but something akin to plot-line narration, if one is equipped to "read" it."

"Churches which emphasise ecstatic possession by the spirit, which foster prophecy and spiritual healing and exorcism have been seen as continuations of African belief and practice. Yet these very features, which are taken as being most African, are in reality the most Christian aspect of such churches. They spring directly from increasingly strong tendencies in world Christianity in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They spring in fact either from anti-establishment Christian Pentecostalism, as it developed in Europe and North America, or from evangelical revivalist tendencies within the major mission churches themselves. Few independent church leaders have claimed to be continuing African traditions."

"O love's a simple word to say With nature aiding and abetting;"

"For to love, loveless, is a bitter pill: But to be loved, unloving, bitterer still."

"And I am a mockery, who was God before."

"Then say–how come the years to seem so swift, The days, the days so slow?"

"Come, let us wage a holy war!"

"Now heaven be thanked, I am out of love again! I have been long a slave, and now am free;"

"To be entirely at leisure for one day is to be for one day an immortal:"

"In childhood the daylight always fails too soon -- except when there are going to be fireworks;"

"She noted with delight that he really did say "Ha!" This made a valuable addition to her collection. She had lately acquired a "Humph!" and two "Whews!" but she was still waiting in vain for a "Pshaw!""

"Den Menschen verbessern - damit fängt aller Terror an, Religionsstifter, Totalitäre, selbstgerechte Stückeschreiber, Ideologen wollen immer den neuen Menschen, den besseren."

"'The merging of different motif areas in her drawings and the transformation of spacial relationships into flat correspondences gathers towards a distortion of depicted reality and the dissolution of its phenomenal form.' I didn't try to reach the sense of this. I understood the point of it was to transpose the locus of authority from the works to the discussion of the works. The writer had assumed the role of validating authority for the images he discussed. In order to do this he had been required to transform what he saw with his eyes into ideologies that he could 'see' with his intellect."

"It is human life you value isn't it? Not its worth. Just human life. As if it were gold and could be neither good nor bad nor worth more nor worth less but must always be worth the same no matter what. One human life is one human life to you. You are absurd! Like your democracy, which you imagine you got from the Greeks, who had slaves. One vote for each person. What a stupid idea! The worst in your eyes possess the same value as the best. You have no way of differentiating between them."

"I have discovered motives, my own and everyone else's, to be impenetrable."

"The point of a story can penetrate far deeper than the point of any bullet."

"Perfection isn’t a thing, It is a moment. A very brief moment that in time, that is lost as the world and the universe continues to move around you. If we are going to reject solutions because they aren’t perfect or come from imperfect people, then we will never move forward."

"Our nature hardly allows us to have enough of anything without having too much."

"Every single Act either weakeneth or improveth our Credit with other Men ; and as an habit of being just to our Word will confirm, so an habit of too freely dispensing with it must necessarily destroy it."

"A Husband without Faults is a dangerous Observer."

"In your Clothes avoid too much Gaudy ; do not value your self upon an Imbroidered Gown ; and remember, that a reasonable Word, or an obliging Look, will gain you more respect, than all your fine Trappings."

"Remember that Children and Fools want every thing because they want Wit to distinguish: and therefore there is no stronger Evidence of a Crazy Understanding, than the making too large a Catalogue of things necessary, when in truth there are so very few things that have a right to be placed in it."

"A Princely Mind will undo a private Family."

"Love is a Passion that hath Friends in the Garrison."

"The Triumph of Wit is to make your good Nature subdue your Censure; to be quick in seeing Faults, and slow in exposing them. You are to consider, that the invisible thing called a Good Name, is made up of the Breath of Numbers that speak well of you; so that if by a disobliging Word you silence the meanest, the Gale will be less strong which is to bear up your Esteem."

"The sight of a drunkard is a better sermon against that vice than the best that was ever preached on that subject."

"A very great Memory often forgetteth how much Time is lost by repeating things of no Use."

"The People are never so perfectly backed, but that they will kick and fling if not stroked at seasonable times."

"A Prince who will not undergo the Difficulty of Understanding, must undergo the Danger of Trusting."

"Nothing is less forgiven than setting Patterns Men have no mind to follow."

"Men are so unwilling to displease a Prince, that it is as dangerous to inform him right, as to serve him wrong."

"Most Mens' Anger about Religion is as if two Men should quarrel for a Lady they neither of them care for."

"When the People contend for their Liberty, they seldom get any thing by their Victory but new Masters."

"Laws are generally not understood by three sorts of persons, viz. by those who make them, by those who execute them, and by those who suffer, if they break them."

"If the Laws could speak for themselves, they would complain of the Lawyers in the first Place."

"The best Party is but a kind of Conspiracy against the rest of the Nation. They put every body else out of their Protection. Like the Jews to the Gentiles, all others are the Offscowrings of the World."

"Men are not hang'd for stealing Horses, but that Horses may not be stolen."

"Malice is of a low Stature, but it hath very long Arms."

"The best way to suppose what may come, is to remember what is past."

"Anger is never without an Argument, but seldom with a good one."

"There is Reason to think the most celebrated Philosophers would have been Bunglers at Business ; but the Reason is because they despised it."

"Popularity is a Crime from the Moment it is sought ; it is only a Virtue where Men have it whether they will or no."

"No Man is so much a Fool as not to have Wit enough sometimes to be a Knave ; nor any so cunning a Knave, as not to have the Weakness sometimes to play the Fool."

"In this Age, when it is said of a Man, He knows how to live , it may be imply’d he is not very honest."

"It is Ill-manners to silence a Fool, and Cruelty to let him go on."

"Most men make little other use of their Speech than to give evidence against their own Understanding."

"Hope is generally a wrong Guide, though it is very good Company by the way. It brusheth through Hedge and Ditch till it cometh to a great Leap, and there it is apt to fall and break its Bones."

"Malice is of a low Stature, but it hath very long Arms. It often reacheth into the next World, Death itself is not a Bar to it."

"Malice, like Lust, when it is at the Height, doth not know Shame."

"The vanity of teaching often tempteth a Man to forget he is a Blockhead."

"The first mistake belonging to business is the going into it."

"Men make it such a point of honour to be fit for business that they forget to examine whether business is fit for a man."

"It is not a reproach but a compliment to learning, to say, that great scholars are less fit for business; since the truth is, business is so much a lower thing than learning, that a man used to the last cannot easily bring his stomach down to the first."

"If Men considered how many Things there are that Riches cannot buy, they would not be so fond of them."

"They who are of opinion that Money will do every thing, may very well be suspected to do every thing for Money."

"Money hath too great a Preference given to it by States, as well as by particular Men."

"A Little Learning misleadeth, and a great deal often stupifieth the Understanding."

"When by habit a man cometh to have a bargaining soul, its wings are cut, so that it can never soar. It bindeth reason an apprentice to gain, and instead of a director, maketh it a drudge."

"Weak men are apt to be cruel."

"Folly is often more cruel in the consequence, than malice can be in the intent."

"The condition of mankind is to be weary of what we do know, and afraid of what we do not."

"Modesty is oftner mistaken than any other Virtue."

"Men who borrow their Opinions can never repay their Debts. They are Beggars by Nature, and can therefore never get a Stock to grow rich upon."

"A Man is to go about his own Business as if he had not a Friend in the World to help him in it."

"If Men would think how often their own Words are thrown at their Heads, they would less often let them go out of their Mouths."

"A man that should call every thing by its right Name, would hardly pass the Streets without being knock'd down as a common Enemy."

"A Man may so overdo it in looking too far before him, that he may stumble the more for it."

"He that leaveth nothing to chance will do few things ill, but he will do very few things."

"A wise man will keep his Suspicions muzzled, but he will keep them awake."

"Suspicion seldom wanteth Food to keep it up in Health and Vigour. It feedeth upon every thing it seeth, and is not curious in its Diet."

"MANY Men swallow the being cheated, but no Man could ever endure to chew it."

"Men take more pains to hide than to mend themselves."

"The best Qualification of a Prophet is to have a good Memory."

"Some Mens Memory is like a Box, where a Man should mingle his Jewels with his old Shoes."

"A Man may dwell so long upon a Thought, that it may take him Prisoner."

"Half the Truth is often as arrant a Lye, as can be made."

"It is a general Mistake to think the Men we like are good for every thing, and those we do not, good for nothing."

"A Man who is Master of Patience, is Master of everything else."

"Nothing hath an uglier Look to us than Reason, when it is not of our side."

"MISPENDING a Man's time is a kind of self-homicide, it is making Life to be of no use."

"Nothing would more contribute to make a Man wise, than to have always an Enemy in his view."

"Among the statesmen of those times Halifax was, in genius, the first. His intellect was fertile, subtle, and capacious. His polished, luminous, and animated eloquence, set off by the silver tones of his voice, was the delight of the House of Lords. His conversation overflowed with thought, fancy, and wit. His political tracts well deserve to be studied for their literary merit, and fully entitle him to a place among English classics. To the weight derived from talents so great and various he united all the influence which belongs to rank and ample possessions. Yet he was less successful in politics than many who enjoyed smaller advantages. Indeed, those intellectual peculiarities which make his writings valuable frequently impeded him in the contests of active life. For he always saw passing events, not in the point of view in which they commonly appear to one who bears a part in them, but in the point of view in which, after the lapse of many years, they appear to the philosophic historian. With such a turn of mind, he could not long continue to act cordially with any body of men. All the prejudices, all the exaggerations, of both the great parties in the state moved his scorn. He despised the mean arts and unreasonable clamours of demagogues. He despised still more the doctrines of divine right and passive obedience. He sneered impartially at the bigotry of the Churchman and at the bigotry of the Puritan. He was equally unable to comprehend how any man should object to Saints' days and surplices, and how any man should persecute any other man for objecting to them. In temper he was what, in our time, is called a Conservative: in theory he was a Republican. Even when his dread of anarchy and his disdain for vulgar delusions led him to side for a time with the defenders of arbitrary power, his intellect was always with Locke and Milton. Indeed, his jests upon hereditary monarchy were sometimes such as would have better become a member of the Calf's Head Club than a Privy Councillor of the Stuarts. In religion he was so far from being a zealot that he was called by the uncharitable an atheist: but this imputation he vehemently repelled; and in truth, though he sometimes gave scandal by the way in which he exerted his rare powers both of reasoning and of ridicule on serious subjects, he seems to have been by no means unsusceptible of religious impressions."

"He was the chief of those politicians whom the two great parties contemptuously called Trimmers. Instead of quarrelling with this nickname, he assumed it as a title of honour, and vindicated, with great vivacity, the dignity of the appellation. Everything good, he said, trims between extremes. The temperate zone trims between the climate in which men are roasted and the climate in which they are frozen. The English Church trims between the Anabaptist madness and the Papist lethargy. The English constitution trims between Turkish despotism and Polish anarchy. Virtue is nothing but a just temper between propensities any one of which, if indulged to excess, becomes vice. Nay, the perfection of the Supreme Being himself consists in the exact equilibrium of attributes, none of which could preponderate without disturbing the whole moral and physical order of the world. Thus Halifax was a Trimmer on principle. He was also a Trimmer by the constitution both of his head and of his heart. His understanding was keen, sceptical, inexhaustibly fertile in distinctions and objections; his taste refined; his sense of the ludicrous exquisite; his temper placid and forgiving, but fastidious, and by no means prone either to malevolence or to enthusiastic admiration. Such a man could not long be constant to any band of political allies. He must not, however, be confounded with the vulgar crowd of renegades. For though, like them, he passed from side to side, his transition was always in the direction opposite to theirs. He had nothing in common with those who fly from extreme to extreme, and who regard the party which they have deserted with an animosity far exceeding that of consistent enemies. His place was on the debatable ground between the hostile divisions of the community, and he never wandered far beyond the frontier of either. The party to which he at any moment belonged was the party which, at that moment, he liked least, because it was the party of which at that moment he had the nearest view. He was therefore always severe upon his violent associates, and was always in friendly relations with his moderate opponents. Every faction in the day of its insolent and vindictive triumph incurred his censure; and every faction, when vanquished and persecuted, found in him a protector. To his lasting honour it must be mentioned that he attempted to save those victims whose fate has left the deepest stain both on the Whig and on the Tory name."

"'Righteous hatred' is in the same category as 'righteous cancer' or 'righteous tuberculosis'. All of them are absurd concepts."

"The point of Buddhist meditation is not to stop thinking, for … cultivation of insight clearly requires intelligent use of thought and discrimination. What needs to be stopped is conceptualisation that is compulsive, mechanical and unintelligent, that is, activity that is always fatiguing, usually pointless, and at times seriously harmful."

"Over the past three millennia, the Indic traditions have developed rigorous methods for refining the attention, and then applying that attention to exploring the origins, nature, and role of consciousness in the natural world. The empirical and rational investigations and discoveries by such great Indian contemplatives as Gautama the Buddha profoundly challenge many of the assumptions of the modern West, particularly those of scientific materialism."

"In short, the trajectory of Western science from the time of Copernicus to the modern day seems to have been influenced by medieval Christian cosmology. Just as hell was symbolized as being in the center of the earth, and heaven was in the outermost reaches of space, the inner, the subjective world of man was depicted as being the locus of evil, while the objective world was free of such moral contamination … And it was only in the closing years of the twentieth century that the scientific community began to regard consciousness as a legitimate subject of scientific inquiry. Why did it take psychology – which itself emerged only after many scientists felt that they had already discovered all the principal laws of the universe – a century before it began to address the nature of consciousness?"

"Alan Wallace explains the role of mind in any empirical investigation of consciousness: “The primary instrument that all scientists have used to make any type of observation is the human mind…” However, like any scientific laboratory, one has to first clean, fine-tune, and calibrate the mind: “The untrained mind, which is prone to alternating agitation and dullness, is an unreliable and inadequate instrument for observing anything. To transform it into a suitable instrument for scientific exploration, the stability and vividness of the attention must be developed to a high degree.” This is the scientific importance of yoga, meditation, kundalini, tantra and other systems of achieving higher states of mind, and more evolved states of body, which may then be used to discover deeper layer of reality: “Over the past three millennia, the Indic traditions have developed rigorous methods for refining the attention, and then applying that attention to exploring the origins, nature, and role of consciousness in the natural world. The empirical and rational investigations and discoveries by such great Indian contemplatives as Gautama the Buddha profoundly challenge many of the assumptions of the modern West, particularly those of scientific materialism.”"

"“The first step in developing a science of any kind of phenomena is to develop and refine instruments that allow one to observe and possibly experiment with the phenomena under investigation. The only instrument we have that enables us to observe mental phenomena directly is the mind itself. But since the time of Aristotle, the West has made little, if any, progress in developing means of refining the mind so that it can be used as a reliable instrument for observing mental events. And… there continues to be considerable resistance against developing any such empirical science even today.”"

"“the widespread conclusion among Christian mystics that the highest states of contemplation are necessarily fleeting, commonly lasting no longer than about half an hour[45]. This insistence on the fleeting nature of mystical union appears to originate with Augustine, [46]and it is reflected almost a millennium later in the writings of Meister Eckhart, who emphasized that the state of contemplative rapture is invariably transient, with even its residual effects lasting no longer than three days[47].”"

"“With the advent of the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution, the gradual decline of Christian contemplative inquiry into the nature of consciousness rapidly accelerated. Given the Protestant emphasis on the Augustinian theme of the essential iniquity of the human soul, and man's utter inability to achieve salvation or know God except by faith, there was no longer any theological incentive for such inquiry. Salvation was emphatically presented as an undeserved gift from the Creator.”"

"“Descartes, whose ideological influence on the Scientific Revolution is hard to overestimate, was deeply committed to the introspective examination of the mind. But like his Greek and Christian predecessors, he did not devise any means to refine the attention so that the mind could reliably be used to observe mental events… Moreover, in a theological move that effectively removed the human mind from the natural world, Descartes decreed that the soul is divinely infused into the body, where it exerts its influence on the body by way of the pineal gland… This philosophical stance probably accounts in large part for the fact that the Western scientific study of the mind did not even begin for more than two centuries after Descartes.”"

"“James was well aware of the importance of developing such sustained, voluntary attention, but he acknowledged that he did not know how to achieve this task[48].”"

"One of these days I'll find a way / I'll rise above the throng / They'll be amazed at what they see / One of these days someone will say / I knew it all along / One of these days, that's what will be"

"There is no god, or love, just time / Saying "Do what you will. Nothing's real today" / We are fleeting numbers, and images / Like the liquid crystal digital readout / Floating on the sea of grey."

"Come to your senses, defenses are not the way to go / And you know, or at least you knew / Everything's strange, you've changed and I don't know what to do / To get through"

"In one week I'll be thirty. Three-zero. Older than my Dad was when I was born. Older than Napoleon was when he ... did something that was probably extremely impressive at the time – I'm not a historian. I'm a composer. Sorry, a "promising young composer." I should have kids of my own by now, a career, but instead I've been "promising" for so long I'm afraid I'm starting to break the fucking promise."

"6 AM. The sky glows. Somewhere a bird chirps. I want to shoot it."

"Break of day, the dawn is here / Johnny's up and pacing / Compromise or persevere? / His mind is racing / Johnny has no guide / Johnny wants to hide / Can he make his mark, if he gives up his spark? / Johnny can't decide"

"I want to write music. I want to sit down right now at the piano, and write a song that people will listen to and remember. And do the same thing every morning for the rest of my life."

"This is a car that allows you to adjust the temperature of your ass."

"Chubstitute (a name for a fat substitute)"

"I'm not mad that you got mad when I got mad when you said I should go drop dead."

"We're not gonna pay rent"

"'Cause everything is rent"

"There's only us, there's only this / Forget regret, or life is yours to miss / No other road, no other way / No day but today!"

"Give into love or live in fear"

"Will I lose my dignity? Will someone care? Will I wake tomorrow from this nightmare?"

"Let's open up a restaurant in Santa Fe / Oh, sunny Santa Fe would be nice / We'll open up a restaurant in Santa Fe / And leave this to the roaches and mice"

"I think they meant it when they said you can't buy love, but now I know you can rent it, a new lease you are my love!"

"Life's too short, babe, time's a-flying. I'm looking for baggage that goes with mine."

"The opposite of war isn't peace... It's creation!"

"I'd be happy to die for a taste of what Angel had... Someone to live for... Unafraid to say 'I love you!'"

"You'll never share real love until you love yourself."

"I just came to say goodbye love, goodbye love, goodbye."

"I don't own emotion, I rent!"

"Dying in America / At the end of the millennium / We're dying in America / To come into our own / And when you're dying in America / At the end of the millennium / You're not alone"

"The number one rule of today's marketing – the key secret of those who seek to control your beliefs and habits in order to take your money, your votes, your time or whatever else it is they desire from you – is to always keep in mind that nobody really believes they can be manipulated."

"In some ways, I believe that we are moving into a post-historical period, for lack of a better term. A time when whatever functioned previously will cease to function, or at least will have to be re-thought and re-considered."

"I would almost consider myself a canonical child of Generation X... because I think there is an ethic and aesthetic that goes along with that generation, it may have something to do with the fact that "Never Mind the Bollocks" was released when we were 16-years-old and that was really the album that crystalized a generation."

"Basically, to sum up: We're a generation of anarchists, and we just haven't gotten our hands on the means of production yet so we can fetter the wheels. We haven't been handed the controls yet except to the Internet, which is why it looks like it does."

"I very much consider the Internet a garden, and I'm a gardener, and I plant things in it and I work within the framework of the soil, the seasons, the climate, and the temperature, to produce plants."

"Communication becomes the defining characteristic of homo sapiens; we are the species that speaks. We utter the words that create our world, and have learned to take our words and translate them into the ethereal play of zeros and ones, lay them out, at the speed of light, first on a wire, then a radio wave, and lately, on a beam of light, so that the voice, once constrained by mouth and ear, now straddles the entire planet in thirty millionths of a second, messages pinging back and forth, not unlike the meeting points of a synaptic gap, using photons as neurotransmitters, and each network router the equivalent of a synapic junction, deciding whether to activate or extinguish each message that crosses the continents, connected now in a seamless, endless web of knowledge,more than two billion pages, more than any one of us could ever read or know, the collected and collective intelligence of a species that seems to have made information the central mystery of culture, the project of civilization, and the goal of being."

"I skipped Burning Man this year and realized something. It’s become a cult. And it’s about time we all woke up and recognized it."

"I have an axe to grind. I have a fight to pick. I have a hair across my ass. And I want to share."

"Doesn't it seem as though the thrill's gone out of it? Somehow Burning Man now feels like what Christmas becomes in your grown-up years: a lot of spending, a brief party, and twelve months of fond reminiscences."

"We all know the extent of the hypocrisy which surrounds the War on Drugs; that it is, at essence, a Class War, or, if you will, a Race War, which criminalizes the undesirable elements of society – precisely the rationale behind the Marijuana Tax Act, which provided the legal ammunition to expel with those pesky Mexican immigrants in Texas and California back in the 1930s."

"Cognitive liberty begins at home, behind your eyes and between your ears. The first act of liberation is to step forward, and be counted as one of us."

"A child now entering first grade has never known a world without the Web; I want you, just for a moment, to try to imagine a world without the telephone, without electricity. It’s difficult to do, because both of these technologies are entirely commonplace, woven into the fabric of our culture so intensely it becomes nearly impossible to imagine a time before they existed. As electricity is for us, the Web will be for our children; an invisible field of knowledge that surrounds them, and infuses the entire world with instant answers to their requests. Within a generation, it won’t be important how much you can remember; that will have been replaced by how agile you are at acquiring the facts you need."

"Will anyone here object if, with a ballot paper in this hand, and an armalite in this hand, we take power in Ireland?"

"From the summer of my twelfth year I carry a series of images more vivid and lasting than any others of my boyhood and indelible beyond all attempts the years make to erase or fade them."

"He's hard to see when you look for him."

"That's right. Why? Are you telling me this because I'm Frank's brother? Because I'm your husband? Because I'm Marie's employer?" He paused "Or because I'm the sheriff?"

"Conversely, banning this book would send a signal that the present establishment will do what it can to prevent Hinduism from rising up, from regaining self-confidence, from facing the challenge of hostile ideologies."

"While one should always be vigilant for traces of totalitarianism in any ideology or movement, the obsession with fascism in the anti-Hindu rhetoric of the secularists is not the product of an analysis of the data, but of their own political compulsions."

"The essence of Hindu Dharma is not ‘tolerance’ or ‘equal respect for all religious’ but satya, truth. The problem with Christianity and Islam is superficially their intolerance and fanaticism. But this intolerance is a consequence of these religions’ untruthfulness. If your belief system is based on delusions, you have to pre-empt rational enquiry into it and shield it from contact with more sustainable thought systems. The fundamental problem with monotheistic religions is not that they are intolerant but that they are untrue (Asatya or Anrita)."

"One thing which keeps on astonishing me in the present debate is the complete lack of doubt in both camps. Personally, I don’t think that either theory, of Aryan invasion and of Aryan indigenousness, can claim to have been "proven" by prevalent standards of proof; even though one of the contenders is getting closer. Indeed, while I have enjoyed pointing out the flaws in the AIT statements of the politicized Indian academic establishment and its American amplifiers, I cannot rule out the possibility that the theory which they are defending may still have its merits.""

"Not Muslims but Islam is the problem."

"Future historians will include the no-temple argument of the 1990s as a remarkable case study in their surveys of academic fraud and politicized scholarship."

"I am neither a Hindu nor a nationalist. And I don’t need to belong to those or to any specific ideological categories in order to use my eyes and ears."

"My job was not to survey other people's opinions about the Hindu movement. That would have been an interesting exercise, especially if it is called by its name, viz. a survey of outsider opinions, and not (as many such academic publications are) falsely presented as a study of the Hindu movement itself. By contrast, I endeavoured to get beyond the secondary--source and mainly hostile-source "research" that has so disastrously filled up this field of study, and focus on the primary sources instead."

"I have also never participated in any of the meetings of the various embryonic attempts at creating a "Pagan international", whether the Pagan Federation, the World Council of Ethnic Religions or the World Council of the Elders of the Ancient Traditions and Cultures. But I wish them all the best, for they consist mostly of nice people and I can easily see through the attempts by so-called secularists to blacken them and to deny to them the right of international networking which is deemed only natural in the case of Christians or Muslims."

"Indeed, over the years I have had many a good laugh at the pompous moralism and blatant dishonesty of India's so-called secularists. Their specialty is to justify double standards, e.g. why mentioning murdered Kashmiri Pandits is “communal hate-mongering” while the endless litany about murdered Gujarati Muslims is “secular consciousness-raising”. Sometimes they merely stonewall inconvenient information, such as when they tried to deny and suppress the historical data about the forcible replacement of a Rama temple in Ayodhya by a mosque: given the strength of the evidence, all they could do was to drown out any serious debate with screams and swearwords. But often they do bring out their specific talents at sophistry, such as when they argue that a Common Civil Code, a defining element of all secular states, is a Hindu communalist notion, while the preservation of the divinely-revealed Shari’a for the Muslims is secular. That’s when they are at their best."

"Hindutva is a fairly crude ideology, borrowing heavily from European nationalisms with their emphasis on homogeneity. Under the conditions of British colonialism, it was inevitable that some such form of Hindu nationalism would arise, but I believe better alternatives have seen the light, more attuned to the genius of Hindu civilization."

"As so often in Indo-Pakistani and Hindu-Muslim comparisons, the argument is reminiscent of the inequality between the contenders in the Cold War: you could demonstrate for disarmament in the West, but to demonstrate for this in the East Bloc (except if it were for unilateral disarmament by the Western “war-mongers”) would have put you in trouble."

"The neologism âdivâsî constitutes one of the most successful disinformation campaigns in modern history."

"In the West, secularism implies pinpricking religious fraud and arrogance, but in India, secularists are the most eloquent defenders of myth and theocracy."

"Until 1989, there was a complete consensus in all sources (Hindu, Muslim and European) which spoke out on the matter, viz. that the Babri Masjid had been built in forcible replacement of a Hindu temple.""

"On the eve of his departure, Koenraad Elst asked me if I would publish a book on Ayodhya which he planned to write on his return to Belgium, I did not take him seriously. I did not know at that time that the thirty one years old Belgian we had met was a prodigy, and that he felt so deeply about Hindus having a good case but presenting it very badly. The script of his Ram Janmabhoomi Vs. Babri Masjid: A Case Study in Hindu Muslim Conflict, was dropped on my table by the postman exactly after a month. I could not stop after I started reading it. I took it to Ram Swarup the same evening. He read it during the night and rang me up next morning. Koenraad Elst's book, he said, should be published immediately."

"Elst had much better command of political and social issues in India than I ever gained, unmatched by any western writer and researched in great detail. Elst is a thorough scholar and supremely rational in all that he does. His work on the Ayodhya movement was definitive."

"Fundamentalism is as foreign to Hinduism as honesty is to Christian missions."

"Let it be realized by everybody concerned that India has always been and remains, the citadel of the most bigoted and bloodthirsty zealotry of Islam. The historical reasons for why it is so, are many. I do not have the time to detail them here. The main reason may be told. Islam in India has been what it has been because India has continued to stare at Islam as its greatest failure. Islam in India has never been able to relax, as it could do in countries which it converted completely. And it will not relax till Hindus learn to knock out its ideological fangs which are rooted in the Quran."

"As one reads the scriptures of Christianity and Islam with a morally alert mind, one starts getting sick of the very sound of word ‘god’ which word is littered all over this literature like dead leaves in autumn. The deeds which are ascribed to or approved of by this God are quite often so cruel and obnoxious as to leave one wondering that if these are the doings of the Divine, what else is there which is left for the Devil to do."

"If the Hindus sang Vande Mãtaram in a public meeting, it was a ‘conspiracy’ to convert Muslims into kãfirs. If the Hindus blew a conch, or broke a coconut, or garlanded the portrait of a revered patriot, it was an attempt to ‘force’ Muslims into ‘idolatry’. If the Hindus spoke in any of their native languages, it was an ‘affront’ to the culture of Islam. If the Hindus took pride in their pre-Islamic heroes, it was a ‘devaluation’ of Islamic history. And so on, there were many more objections, major and minor, to every national self-expression. In short, it was a demand that Hindus should cease to be Hindus and become instead a faceless conglomeration of rootless individuals. On the other hand, the ‘minority community’ was not prepared to make the slightest concession in what they regarded as their religious and cultural rights. If the Hindus requested that cow-killing should stop, it was a demand for renouncing an ‘established Islamic practice’. If the Hindus objected to an open sale of beef in the bazars, it was an ‘encroachment’ on the ‘civil rights’ of the Muslims. If the Hindus demanded that cows meant for ritual slaughter should not be decorated and marched through Hindu localities, it was ‘trampling upon time-honoured Islamic traditions’. If the Hindus appealed that Hindu religious processions passing through a public thoroughfare should not be obstructed, it was an attempt to ‘disturb the peace of Muslim prayers’. If the Hindus wanted their native languages to attain an equal status with Urdu in the courts and the administration, it was an ‘assault on Muslim culture’. If the Hindus taught to their children the true history of Muslim tyrants, it was a ‘hate campaign against Islamic heroes’. And the ‘minority community’ was always ready to ‘defend’ its ‘religion and culture’ by taking recourse to street riots."

"Ascribing human brotherhood, social justice, world peace, self-sacrifice and compassion to Christianity and Islam is tantamount to proclaiming that the wolf is a votary of vegetarianism."

"But what has happened is that the Indian State actively patronizes the exercise aimed at making all religions mean the same things, and persecutes those who defy the exercise. A whole army of 'secularist' scribes in the media and the academia has been employed and paid handsomely for whitewashing Islam and Christianity so that whatever is bigoted in the scriptures and blood-soaked histories of these creeds, is carefully exorcised. On the other hand, whatever is liberal and large-hearted, humane and civilized in the pluralistic spirituality of India is remorseless pruned to the prescribed and proper size. In the process, Christianity has been made to mean only the Sermon on the Mount, and Islam equated with two Quranic sentences torn out of context - "Unto you your religion, and unto me my religion" and "There is no compulsion in religion.""

"For Leftists in general have always opposed Theocracy in Muslim and Christian countries. It is only in India that they have become its unrivalled champions."

"No newspaper or periodical worth its name in India will publish what I write in the lines that follow."

"All religions were equal. But Islam was more equal."

"I am placing this book before our people, as I did so many others, simply because I want to be true to my own impulse for action in terms of my own lights. Rest is in the hands of Him who sends Saviours as well as Scourges according to His own inscrutable Law."

"Thus Hindu society not only presents itself as a prey to these exclusive, intolerant and imperialist ideologies but also acts as a buffer between them. India is secular because India is Hindu. It can be added as a corollary that India is a democracy also because India is Hindu. If Hindu society permits this free for all any further, the days of Secularism and Democracy in this country are numbered. Let the Hindus unite and save themselves, their democratic polity, their secular state, and their Sanatana Dharma for a new cycle of civilization, not only for themselves but also the world."

"To me, Dharma had always been a matter of moral norms, external rules and regulations, do's and don'ts, enforced on life by an act of will. Now I was made to see Dharma as a multi dimensional movement of man's inner law of being, his psychic evolution, his spiritual growth, and his spontaneous building of an outer life for himself and the community in which lie lived."

"It never occurred to these knaves and fools that the Christian missionary whom they were aping and helping was viewed in the modern West as a maniac whom it was better to dump abroad with a bag of money."

"In the case of Islam, our effort aims at raising the dialogue from the street level to the level of scholarly platforms. For a long time, Hindus have been flattering Muslims by seeing nothing wrong in the doctrine of Islam. For a long time, Muslims have been taking to the streets and shedding blood whenever and wherever Hindus object to their behaviour pattern. Muslims have never been asked by Hindus to reflect on the dogmas of Islam, and revise them wherever they go against peaceful coexistence. We are appealing to Hindus to start asking some questions about Islam so that Muslims are made to rethink. If asking questions with a view to holding a dialogue is provoking violence, we plead guilty again. Hindus had a long tradition of asking questions even about their own cherished doctrines. I wonder if you are well-acquainted with our acharyas - Brahmanic, Buddhist and the rest. It was only with the advent of Islam and, later on, Christianity that Hindus were terrorised into the habit of remaining silent when faced with wild claims and not asking any questions. We are trying to revive the ancient Hindu tradition."

"Meanwhile, please pardon us for saying that we have found no music in the language of your letter, no rhyme in your reasoning, no value in your judgments, and no art or education in your performance as a whole."

"The word secular is defined in the dictionaries as "the belief that the state, morals, education, etc. should be independent of religion." But in India it means only one thing -- eschewing everything Hindu and espousing everything Islamic."

"The only substantial contribution was made by an RSS lawyer hailing from Anantnag in Kashmir. “I have studied Islam in depth,” he said, “and found it to be a great religion. I cannot understand anyone placing Islam in the dock.” Ironically enough this defender of Islam was literally the first to be shot dead when the ethnic cleansing started in the Valley in the winter of 1989."

"My father started Biblia Impex from a small table in a friend's office. He would sit on one side of the table, and his typist would sit on the other side. He was one of the first Indian publishers to send books abroad without asking for advance payment. Other export businesses would never do this. They would always require money in advance. My father understood European integrity. He knew they were trustworthy."

"Once I had seen through the secularists, it was only logical that I would go and make my acquaintance with the people whom they always denounced with such holy indignation. Would those ugly Hindu monsters really be all that ugly? After reading the book History of Hindu-Christian Encounters, I sought out its author, and that's how I met Sita Ram Goel. Come to mention him, I found that in moral stature and depth of scholarship, he completely dwarfed the Stalinist "eminent historians" and other icons of "secularism". Which is why I cannot help frowning when I see Meera Nanda forget her limitations and berate a towering personality like Goel."

"No one has ever refuted him on facts, but many have sought to smear him and his writing. They have thereby transmuted the work from mere scholarship into warning. (...)The forfeiture is exactly the sort of thing which had landed us where we are: where intellectual inquiry is shut out; where our traditions are not examined, and reassessed; and where as a consequence there is no dialogue. It is exactly the sort of thing too which foments reaction. (...)"Freedom of expression which is legitimate and constitutionally protected," it [the Supreme Court] declared last year, "cannot be held to ransom by an intolerant group or people.""

"Humanism, it seems, is almost impossible in America where material progress is part of the national romance whereas in Europe such progress is relished because it feels nice."

"It takes a certain amount of sass to speak up for prose that's rich, succulent and full of novelty. Purple is immoral, undemocratic and insincere; at best artsy, at worst the exterminating angel of depravity."

"The Acol bidding system"

"Since it is probable that any book flying a bullet in its title is going to produce a corpse sooner or later - here it is."

"The sun, heavy-eyed from lack of sleep, owing to the system of a staggered summer time, stumbled into the heavens, and with a heavy sigh set about its duties."

"Vot", asked George I courteously, "is the difference between a public nuisance and a public convenience?"

"She twirls herself, turns round, twirls once more, posing, smiling, laughing, beckoning airily, drifts off, only to turn back beckoning, offering, repulsing, coolly firm, and then turns away, so that you think, well, it’s hopeless, when she glances back lightly, sidelong, her eyes opening, pupils wide, and wider yet, and she’s laughing at you, at you alone, laughing gaily, and you freeze, astonished, your throat constricting, as she hovers lovely and out of reach, out of reach and lovely, smiling at you, her head inclined aside, her hair brushing one cheek, there she is and yet not, unbelievable and simply gorgeous, and your heart tightens as she stands there so lovely, and out of reach."

"Those we loved, they’re dead. Faces behind hands, shy shawls dropped, modestly awry. Those we love, they’re married."

"And be desired, she said while holding me in her arms: because happy are the desired, each and all, she said with eyes closed, in a desperate embrace. And our bodies cuddled up to each other. Happy are those who want to love, she said, today happy are the desired ones. I want you, she said, want your movements, because they all are good for me, want your caresses, because they all are good for me. Give you my untouched young body, because I’m yearning now for your embrace. I give you my vulnerable young body, because I am yearning --- even for pain. Desired you are, and I desire your desire, and do with me whatever you want to do, she said, for happy are the desired ones, each and all, and what I want to be is: desired-for-ever."

"I got out of the bathroom of course. I locked the front door and pushed the big wardrobe up against the bathroom door. I thought it'd be good to be careful. A little too late, maybe. I'm not leaving my apartment. I'm not gonna give it away. No. There's no reason I should. The noise from the bathroom was the shattering of my porcelain toilet bowl. They're in the bathroom. A lot. There's a lot of them. A bunch of sniffling snouts. A bunch of rats. They're already chewing the wardrobe. I'm standing in my room, listening to their swarming. Thousands of rats, in my apartment. All of them gnawing. I wait. Wait for them to get in. They'll be in here soon. It won't be long. They're coming. Rats. My rats. I'm waiting. What else can I do?"

"It is my belief that everyone is a stranger as an individual and since everyone is a stranger, that is precisely the reason we cannot question someone else’s strangeness or otherness. It is that simple. We ourselves are strangers. Often even to ourselves... And while people have some kind of desperate desire to belong somewhere, as I see it, many people also have a perpetual desire to be outsiders."

"Untimely grave."

"And though he promise to his loss, He makes his promise good."

"The sweet remembrance of the just Shall flourish when he sleeps in dust."

"¡Qué rico es ser boricua!"

"Though heaven be given us freely, yet we must contend for it, "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might" (Eccl. 9:10)"

"Seriousness is the Christian's ballast which keeps him from being overturned with vanity."

"Though the way of religion has thorns in it with respect to persecution, yet it is full of roses with respect to that inward peace and contentment that the soul finds in it."

"There is nothing that can hurt the soul but sin; it is not affliction that hurts it, it often makes it better, as the furnace makes gold the purer; but it is sin that damnifies."

"Obedience carries in it the life-blood of religion."

"The excellence of a thing is the end for which it was made; as of a star to give light, and of a plant to be fruitful. So the excellence of a Christian is to answer the end of his creation, which is to hallow God’s name, and live to that God by whom he lives."

"We may read many truths in the Bible, but we cannot know them savingly, till God by his Spirit shines upon our soul."

"Repentance is never out of season."

"Repentance is a grace of God's Spirit whereby a sinner is inwardly humbled and visibly reformed."

"O that we would therefore, while we are on this side of the grave, make our peace with God! Tomorrow may be our dying day; let this be our repenting day."

"In Adam we all suffered shipwreck and repentance is the only plank left us after shipwreck to swim to heaven."

"The first sermon that Christ preached, indeed, the first word of his sermon was 'Repent'."

"Repentance is a pure gospel grace. The covenant of works admitted no repentance; there it was, sin and die. Repentance came in by the gospel. Christ has purchased in his blood that repenting sinners shall be saved."

"The two great graces essential to a saint in this life are faith and repentance. These are the two wings by which he flies to heaven."

"...the vinegar of the law, then the wine of the gospel..."

"That preaching is to be preferred which makes the truest discovery of men's sins and shows them their hearts."

"...too much leniency emboldens sin..."

"Though heaven be given us freely, yet we must contend for it, "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might" (Eccl 9:10). Our work is great, our time short, our Master urgent. We have need therefore to summon together all the powers of our souls and strive as in a matter of life and death, that we may arrive at the kingdom above."

"When zeal like incense burns, first the lamp of knowledge must be lighted."

"Truth is unerring; it is the star which leads to Christ. Truth is pure (Psa 119:140)"

""The heavens being on fire shall be dissolved" (2 Peter 3:12), but not that truth which came from heaven (1 Peter 1:25)"

"Truth has noble effects. Truth is the seed of the new birth. God does not regenerate us by miracles or revelations, but by the word of truth (James 1:18). As truth is the breeder of grace, so it is the feeder of it (1Ti 4:6). Truth sanctifies: "Sanctify them through Thy truth" (John 17:17)."

"Truth is an antidote against error. Error is the adultery of the mind."

"Just so is the case of many; God gives them precious time in which they are to provide for a kingdom, and they waste this time of life and cut it all into chips. Let this excite violence in the things of God. It is the main errand of our living here..."

"Sometimes when a man is dying, he directs that his body shall be given to doctors, so that the causes of his suffering and death may be investigated, and the knowledge used to help others. I cannot give my body yet; only my heart and my mind, trusting that by this gift I can give some hope and courage to other men like myself, and to the rest of the world some understanding."

"I had seen a great deal of barristers by now. I realized that their profession was closely akin to that of actors, and that insincerity was the stock-in-trade of most of them. But how could they be sincere, alternating as they did between Crown and defence, knowing the tricks of both sides? It would be as unreasonable to expect sincerity from a prostitute. Year in, year out, these men stood, now on one side, now on the other, pleading the cause of the Crown and criminal with equal vehemence. At the end of a long career at the Bar they must have become like stones, washed clean of all sympathy, all hope for humanity, all regard for truth – and it was then, by a singular stroke of irony, that they were made into judges."

"Montaigne [puts] not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence."

"[The sensate body possesses] an art of interrogating the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired exegesis"

"The accidents of our bodily constitution can always play this revealing role on the condition that they become a means of extending our knowledge by the consciousness which we have of them, instead of being submitted to as pure facts which dominate us. Ultimately, El Greco's supposed visual disorder was conquered by him and so profoundly integrated into his manner of thinking and being that it appears finally as the necessary expression of his being much more than as a peculiarity imposed from the outside. It is no longer a paradox to say that "El Greco was astigmatic because he produced elongated bodies." Everything which was accidental in the individual, that is, everything which revealed partial and independent dialectics without relationship to the total signification of his life, has been assimilated and centered in his deeper life. Bodily events have ceased to constitute autonomous cycles, to follow the abstract patterns of biology and psychology, and have received a new meaning."

"By becoming the pure subject who knows the world objectively, man ultimately realizes that absolute consciousness with respect to which the body and individual existence are no longer anything but objects; death is deprived of meaning. Reduced to the status of object of consciousness, the body could not be conceived as an intermediary between "things" and the consciousness which knows them."

"The world is nothing but 'world-as-meaning.'"

"Hardness and softness, roughness and smoothness, moonlight and sunlight present themselves in our recollection not preeminently as sensory contents but as certain kinds of symbioses, certain ways outside has of invading us and certain ways we have of meets this invasion..."

"Language transcends us and yet, we speak."

"The function [of objective thinking] is to reduce all phenomena which bear witness to the union of subject and world, putting in their place the clear idea of the object as in itself and of the subject as pure consciousness. It therefore severs the links which unite the thing and the embodied subject, leaving only sensible qualities to make up our world (to the exclusion of the modes of appearance which we have described), and preferably visual qualities, because these give the impression of being autonomous, and because they are less directly linked to our body and present us with an object rather than introducing us into an atmosphere. But in reality all things are concretions of a setting, and any explicit perception of a thing survives in virtue of a previous communication with a certain atmosphere."

"It is a great good fortune, as Stendhal said, for one “to have his passion as a profession.”"

"Even those who have desired to work out a completely positive philosophy have been philosophers only to the extent that, at the same time, they have refused the right to install themselves in absolute knowledge. They taught not this knowledge, but its becoming in us, not the absolute but, at most, our absolute relation to it, as Kierkegaard said. What makes a philosopher is the movement which leads back without ceasing from knowledge to ignorance, from ignorance to knowledge, and a kind of rest in this movement."

"Thought without language, says Lavelle, would not be a purer thought; it would be no more than the intention to think. And his last book offers a theory of expressiveness which makes of expression not “a faithful image of an already realized interior being, but the very means by which it is realized.”"

"Theology recognizes the contingency of human existence only to derive it from a necessary being, that is, to remove it. Theology makes use of philosophical wonder only for the purpose of motivating an affirmation which ends it. Philosophy, on the other hand, arouses us to what is problematic in our own existence and in that of the world, to such a point that we shall never be cured of searching for a solution."

"De Lubac discusses an atheism which means to suppress this searching, he says, “even including the problem as to what is responsible for the birth of God in human consciousness.”"

"Socrates reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it."

"Lichtenberg … held something of the following kind: one should neither affirm the existence of God nor deny it. … It is not that he wished to leave certain perspectives open, nor to please everyone. It is rather that he was identifying himself, for his part, with a consciousness of self, of the world, and of others that was “strange” (the word is his) in a sense which is equally well destroyed by the rival explanations."

"Thinking which displaces, or otherwise defines, the sacred has been called atheistic, and that philosophy which does not place it here or there, like a thing, but at the joining of things and words, will always be exposed to this reproach without ever being touched by it."

"The philosopher will ask himself … if the criticism we are now suggesting is not the philosophy which presses to the limit that criticism of false gods which Christianity has introduced into our history."

"Philosophy is in history, and is never independent of historical discourse. But for the tacit symbolism of life it substitutes, in principle, a conscious symbolism; for a latent meaning, one that is manifest. It is never content to accept its historical situation. It changes this situation by revealing it to itself."

"Machiavelli is the complete contrary of a machiavellian, since he describes the tricks of power and “gives the whole show away.” The seducer and the politician, who live in the dialectic and have a feeling and instinct for it, try their best to keep it hidden."

"My Master and my Lord! I long to do some work, some work for Thee; I long to bring some lowly gift of love For all Thy love to me."

"Thou wilt draw nigh! Father — it is no dream that Thou art near — No dream that, in my sin and misery, I may look up to Thee,— May hide beneath the shadow of Thy wings, From all the restlessness of outward things, And from my own heart's self-accusing fears — For Thou art nigh."

"Like dew on drooping blossoms, Like breath from Holy place, Laden with health and healing, Come Thy deep words of grace: "Thy strength is all in leaning On One who fights for thee; Thine is the helpless clinging, And mine the victory.""

"When you run with the Doctor, it feels like it'll never end. But however hard you try you can't run forever. Everybody knows that everybody dies and nobody knows it like the Doctor. But I do think that all the skies of all the worlds might just turn dark if he ever, for one moment, accepts it."

"Everybody knows that everybody dies. But not every day. Not today. Some days are special. Some days are so, so blessed. Some days, nobody dies at all. Now and then, every once in a very long while, every day in a million days, when the wind stands fair and the Doctor comes to call, everybody lives."

"We saw some amazing actresses for this part. But when Karen came through the door, the game was up — she was funny, clever, gorgeous and sexy. Or Scottish, which is the quick way of saying it. A generation of little girls will want to be her. And a generation of little boys will want them to be her too."

"I'm not a psychopath, Anderson, I'm a high-functioning sociopath. Do your research."

"As we all know, it is the proper duty of every British subject to come to the aid of the TARDIS."

"What would be the point of having this job if I didn't get to make up some of the maddest possible scenes I've ever had in my head since I was a kid? For him to stand there and take the mickey out of all those monsters — is just hugely exciting."

"First there were the Daleks...And then there was a man who fought them. And then, in time — he died. There are a few, of course, who believe that this man somehow survived, and that one day he will return. For both our sakes, dearest Hannah, we must hope these stories are true."

"Do you know how you make someone into a Dalek? Subtract Love, add Anger."

"I think people have come to think a plot hole is something which isn’t explained on screen. A plot hole is actually something that can’t be explained."

"We've kind of got to tell a lie. We'll go back into history and there will be black people where, historically, there wouldn't have been, and we won't dwell on that. We'll say, 'To hell with it, this is the imaginary, better version of the world. By believing in it, we'll summon it forth'."

"I want people to stop saying it. It is witless. It is appalling that in the face of people's genuine tragedy and traumatic loss, you trot out a stock phrase. What is the matter with you? "Thoughts and prayers?" How about you send money? I mean, how about you send some help? How about you do something? "Thoughts and prayers" is, "Nevermind. Oh, well." I thought that if I can just get it in there like, "Exterminate," as what evil robots say, then maybe people will stop saying that idiotic phrase."

"All the wars and strifes between tribes, races, nations, from the beginning until now, have been the result of man's effort to govern himself and the world, rather than to submit to the government of God."

"God has always kept on earth a government of his own…In Eden the government was direct, individual and personal. God spoke directly to man and gave specific commands to be obeyed."

"Every one who honors and serves the human government and relies upon it, for good, more than he does upon the Divine government, worships and serves the creature more than he does the Creator."

"Human government, the embodied effort of man to rule the world without God, ruled over by "the prince of this world," the devil. Its mission is to execute wrath and vengeance here on earth. Human government bears the same relation to hell as the church bears to heaven."

"It is the duty of the Christian to submit to the human government in its office and work and to seek its destruction only by spreading the religion of Christ and so converting men from service to the earthly government to service to the heavenly one, and so, too, by removing the necessity for its existence and work. No violence, no sword, no bitterness or wrath can he use. The spread of the peaceful principles of the Savior, will draw men out of the kingdoms of earth into the kingdom of God."

"Where the people fear the government you have tyranny. Where the government fears the people you have liberty."

"Die wahre heutige Faulheit besteht in einer toten Bewegung."

"Arbeit ist Bewegung, aber das unsrige. Wir haben die verhängnisvolle Fähigkeit, andere nachahmen zu können, z. B. ein Mühlrad."

"Klassenbewusstsein, ja, die Theorie ist nur allzu richtig. Aber es gibt noch eine dritte Klasse, die des Sokrates, die der Unversöhnlichen."

"I noticed in the front row a small, very pale, almost white man, old, tremendously alert, old in the only way I love old age, namely more alive for all the years, more attentive, more unrelenting, expectant and ready, as though he still had to make up his mind about most things and must not disregard anything."

"Quella guerra è giusta ch’ è necessaria : e quelle armi sono pie, nelle quali non resta altra speranza che nelle dette armi."

"Non hanno gli huomini maggior nimico che la troppa prosperità, perchè gli fa impotenti di se medesimi, licentiosi et arditi al male, e cupidi di turbare il ben proprio con cose nuove."

"Gli Ambasciadori sono gli occhi e gli orecchi de gli stati."

"Do you know, sir, it is God who has planted such doubts in you. That is His way of putting you to the test"

"Sir, who would think of criticizing you for committing mistakes when you speak Kannada? The mistakes you committed whenyou spoke in English could have been made in Kannada too."

"Ramu is our youngest child. He does not know how to write. The only thing he knows is to scribble on the slate. When the slate is covered with lines, he asks me to look at what he has written. Writing for him is nothing but scribbling. If, with some luck, one of the lines turns out to be letter, it’s not his fault. w:Brahma}Brahma’s writing is no different. Unpredictability is its characteristic. Not even one ina thousand is good. If one turns out to be good it’s not my fault. My wife was convinced that all this was Vedanta. She did not pay any attention to it."

"Father of Kannada"

"One who has a gentle and profound insight into what lasts in India, and what elements inherent in human nature threaten it...the best in traditions of the East and the West have gone into the making of his liberal humanist philosophy."

"When you read Masti you realize that his stories and characters are a part of yourself and in them you see a world you want to touch and long to hold. In these days of transient joys, that is nice feeling to have"

"But in 1911, when Masti Venkatesh Iyengar published a few short stories, the discernible birth of Kannada short story can be said to have taken place. Page 131"

"Some people argue that Masti is not a novelist, and that he is only a short story writer. But there is no evidence that those critics have read Masti's novels. If Masti is not a novelist, neither are Tolstoy and Dostoevsky."

"The clever folks who claim that we don’t want your temples and that our goodness alone is sufficient, prop up a non-existent opposition to the same indivisible truth that underlies goodness and the principle upon which temples are based…Blind belief is not God. Neither is superstition. However, the social and national good that ensues from such beliefs is Godliness. Because of the capacity of these beliefs to accomplish the aforementioned good, the innate force that inspires these beliefs and traditions is called God. Be it Pandit Nehru or the common people, we learnt the mind set of condemning the superstitions of Hindus from the British. Some sections of the British condemned Sanatana Dharma in order to propagate Christianity. We convinced ourselves that they were telling the truth and began to feel ashamed of Sanatana Dharma. In the process, we overlooked an important aspect. Blind belief and superstitious rituals aren’t exclusive only to Sanatana Dharma. Such beliefs and superstitions exist among the followers of every religion including Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists."

"I think that wherever your journey takes you, there are new gods waiting there, with divine patience — and laughter."

"In the realm of ESP, precognition, dreams, and related matters, there are few guideposts and little common sense applied. Most of the books written in the so-called "occult" or "spiritual" fields were worthless nonsense in my opinion -- as were treatises that debunked all subjective experiences as "unscientific.""

"As I became accustomed to keeping dream records, the dreams themselves got "better," with more direct information and precognitive "hits.""

"If you could see the dreams of any town, or neighborhood, or family, or any group of people, would all waking events appear there in bits and pieces?"

"What struck me more than the book's UFO stories, however, was the common thread weaving among them of breathtaking alterations in consciousness associated with the experiences -- sensations of leaving the body, of flying through the air or being "carried along by the wind," and receiving "startling and novel insights into the nature of reality" that reverberated thereafter with profound, life-changing effects."

"Originally presented in The "Unknown" Reality, the counterpart idea holds that each of us is neurologically and psychically connected to others who are living in roughly the same given time period and exploring related areas of interest of life-themes; counterparts spring, as it were, from the same entity, or source-self, thus gaining experience from many simultaneous viewpoints."

"She said that she was technically a virgin when she married Rob. That after she and Walt were married, when they first came to making love and she caught sight of his penis, she'd cracked up because it was so big and she couldn't see how in hell they'd manage it. She never said in so many words, "I never had sexual interourse with Walt," e.g. But when I asked her, "So you were technically a virgin when you married Rob" (words to this effect), she said yes. She said that whenever she and Rob made love before a Seth session, or before a class session, that the results for the ensuing session were spectacular. And that sometimes she and Rob would make love for the sake of these results in a session."

"Jane never said much about this to me, and the few comments she did make, about a priest who "chased her around the bed," were delivered casually in group settings, with deprecating humor, no hint of the frightening child-molesting scenario or later sexual browbeating that Rob's notes make plain."

"To label Seth as a spirit guide is to limit an understanding of what he is . . . The minute I found out after my first book was published that this automatically put me in what people called the psychic field . . . I was so humiliated I could hardly hold my head up. I'm using my writing [and] my life to transform intuitive, sometimes revelationary material into art, where it can be enjoyed, understood to varying degrees, and stand free of the stupid interpretations . . . The whole psychic bit as it is, is intellectually and morally psychologically outrageous as far as I'm concerned and I want no part of it or the vocabulary or the ideas."

"Jane's attitude toward reincarnation (like mine) was strongly ambivalent. The idea of physical life being expressed in many historical situations made emotional and intuitive sense to her. Intellectually, however, she was highly suspicious of the standard notion of reincarnation, particularly as any kind of pat answer to present problems. Thus, when class started to experience the theory of reincarnation in emotionally-charged drama form, Jane would often find herself in a most uncomfortable one-foot-on-the-dock, one-foot-in-the-boat position, at once intellectually scandalized and intuitively involved. Even on those occasions when the inner events would "click," or when Seth gave past-life information that made complete sense to people, Jane worried about it for days afterwards. What was the meaning of such memories? Where did they come from? Were we creating the events through suggestion, combined with a need for emotional outlet? Or did we actually remember people who lived -- in our terms -- long before any of us were born? These questions demanded the class maintain a balance, from which Jane never let things stray too far."

"If a rapist comes to your door, then your own fears and anger and aggression have brought him there. You have broadcast your feelings, and he has picked them up . . . There is a reason -- there are no accidents."

"But in your terms, the population of the Earth is made of counterparts, and so there is, indeed, a relationship; and when you kill an enemy, you are killing a version of yourself."

"The Point of Power Is in the Present."

"You must realize that your personal self grows as naturally out of that universe as, in other terms, any star does, or any flower, or any oak leaf. You are a part of that system. AND WHEN YOU SEND OUT A PLEA, YOU DO INDEED SET THE UNIVERSE IN MOTION, SO THAT THE PLEA IS ANSWERED! And so do you also send help to others, often even when you are not aware of it, as a flower sends out help to someone simply because it is beautiful."

"If there is one well-established truth in political economy, it is this:"

"There are two ways of considering society. According to some, the development of human associations is not subject to providential, unchangeable laws. Rather, these associations, having originally been organized in a purely artificial manner by primeval legislators, can later be modified or remade by other legislators, in step with the progress of social science. In this system the government plays a preeminent role, because it is upon it, the custodian of the principle of authority, that the daily task of modifying and remaking society devolves. According to others, on the contrary, society is a purely natural fact. Like the earth on which it stands, society moves in accordance with general, preexisting laws. In this system, there is no such thing, strictly speaking, as social science; there is only economic science, which studies the natural organism of society and shows how this organism functions."

"Man experiences a multitude of needs, on whose satisfaction his happiness depends, and whose non-satisfaction entails suffering. Alone and isolated, he could only provide in an incomplete, insufficient manner for these incessant needs. The instinct of sociability brings him together with similar persons, and drives him into communication with them. Therefore, impelled by the self-interest of the individuals thus brought together, a certain division of labor is established, necessarily followed by exchanges. In brief, we see an organization emerge, by means of which man can more completely satisfy his needs than he could living in isolation. This natural organization is called society. The object of society is therefore the most complete satisfaction of man's needs. The division of labor and exchange are the means by which this is accomplished."

"Everywhere, men resign themselves to the most extreme sacrifices rather than do without government and hence security, without realizing that in so doing, they misjudge their alternatives."

"Suppose that a man found his person and his means of survival incessantly menaced […]Even though this man might be asked to surrender a very considerable portion of his time and of his labor to someone who takes it upon himself to guarantee the peaceful possession of his person and his goods, wouldn't it be to his advantage to conclude this bargain?Still, it would obviously be no less in his self-interest to procure his security at the lowest price possible."

"In all cases, for all commodities that serve to provide for the tangible or intangible needs of the consumer, it is in the consumer's best interest that labor and trade remain free, because the freedom of labor and of trade have as their necessary and permanent result the maximum reduction of price."

"The interests of the consumer of any commodity whatsoever should always prevail over the interests of the producer."

"The production of security should, in the interests of the consumers of this intangible commodity, remain subject to the law of free competition. … [N]o government should have the right to prevent another government from going into competition with it, or to require consumers of security to come exclusively to it for this commodity."

"The production of security should, in the interests of the consumers of this intangible commodity, remain subject to the law of free competition."

"No government should have the right to prevent another government from going into competition with it, or to require consumers of security to come exclusively to it for this commodity."

"But why should there be an exception relative to security? What special reason is there that the production of security cannot be relegated to free competition? Why should it be subjected to a different principle and organized according to a different system?"

"It offends reason to believe that a well-established natural law can admit of exceptions. A natural law must hold everywhere and always, or be invalid. I cannot believe, for example, that the universal law of gravitation, which governs the physical world, is ever suspended in any instance or at any point of the universe. Now I consider economic laws comparable to natural laws, and I have just as much faith in the principle of the division of labor as I have in the universal law of gravitation. I believe that while these principles can be disturbed, they admit of no exceptions."

"In the entire world, there is not a single establishment of the security industry that is not based on monopoly or on communism. […] Political economy has disapproved equally of monopoly and communism in the various branches of human activity, wherever it has found them. Is it not then strange and unreasonable that it accepts them in the security industry?"

"If the roused and insurgent consumers secure the means of production of the salt industry, in all probability they will confiscate this industry for their own profit, and their first thought will be, not to relegate it to free competition, but rather to exploit it, in common, for their own account. They will then name a director or a directive committee to operate the saltworks, to whom they will allocate the funds necessary to defray the costs of salt production. Then, since the experience of the past will have made them suspicious and distrustful, since they will be afraid that the director named by them will seize production for his own benefit, and simply reconstitute by open or hidden means the old monopoly for his own profit, they will elect delegates, representatives entrusted with appropriating the funds necessary for production, with watching over their use, and with making sure that the salt produced is equally distributed to those entitled to it. The production of salt will be organized in this manner.This form of the organization of production has been named communism.When this organization is applied to a single commodity, the communism is said to be partial.When it is applied to all commodities, the communism is said to be complete.But whether communism is partial or complete, political economy is no more tolerant of it than it is of monopoly, of which it is merely an extension."

"Whether communism is partial or complete, political economy is no more tolerant of it than it is of monopoly, of which it is merely an extension."

"Everywhere, when societies originate, we see the strongest, most warlike races seizing the exclusive government of the society. Everywhere we see these races seizing a monopoly on security within certain more or less extensive boundaries, depending on their number and strength.And, this monopoly being, by its very nature, extraordinarily profitable, everywhere we see the races invested with the monopoly on security devoting themselves to bitter struggles, in order to add to the extent of their market, the number of their forced consumers, and hence the amount of their gains.War has been the necessary and inevitable consequence of the establishment of a monopoly on security.Another inevitable consequence has been that this monopoly has engendered all other monopolies."

"Under the rule of free competition, war between the producers of security entirely loses its justification. Why would they make war? To conquer consumers? But the consumers would not allow themselves to be conquered. They would be careful not to allow themselves to be protected by men who would unscrupulously attack the persons and property of their rivals. If some audacious conqueror tried to become dictator, they would immediately call to their aid all the free consumers menaced by this aggression, and they would treat him as he deserved. Just as war is the natural consequence of monopoly, peace is the natural consequence of liberty."

"Either communistic production is superior to free production, or it is not.If it is, then it must be for all things, not just for security.If not, progress requires that it be replaced by free production.Complete communism or complete liberty: that is the alternative!"

"If one takes the thought into one's head that the leaders of the people do not receive their inspirations directly from providence itself, that they obey purely human impulses, the prestige that surrounds them will disappear. One will irreverently resist their sovereign decisions, as one resists anything man-made whose utility has not been clearly demonstrated."

"Because one fine day they took it into their heads to question and to reason, and in questioning, in reasoning, they discovered that their governors governed them no better than they, simpl[e] mortals out of communication with Providence, could have done themselves.It was free inquiry that demonetized the fiction of divine right, to the point where the subjects of monarchs or of aristocracies based on divine right obey them only insofar as they think it in their own self-interest to obey them."

"The moral foundation of authority is neither as solid nor as wide, under a regime of monopoly or of communism, as it could be under a regime of liberty."

"The moral authority of governors rests, in reality, on the self-interest of the governed. The latter having a natural tendency to resist anything harmful to their self-interest, unacknowledged authority would continually require the help of physical force."

"This option the consumer retains of being able to buy security wherever he pleases brings about a constant emulation among all the producers, each producer striving to maintain or augment his clientele with the attraction of cheapness or of faster, more complete and better justice.If, on the contrary, the consumer is not free to buy security wherever he pleases, you forthwith see open up a large profession dedicated to arbitrariness and bad management. Justice becomes slow and costly, the police vexatious, individual liberty is no longer respected, the price of security is abusively inflated and inequitably apportioned, according to the power and influence of this or that class of consumers. The protectors engage in bitter struggles to wrest customers from one another. In a word, all the abuses inherent in monopoly or in communism crop up."

"A careful examination of the facts will decide the problem of government more and more in favor of liberty, just as it does all other economic problems. We are convinced, so far as we are concerned, that one day societies will be established to agitate for the freedom of government, as they have already been established on behalf of the freedom of commerce.And we do not hesitate to add that after this reform has been achieved, and all artificial obstacles to the free action of the natural laws that govern the economic world have disappeared, the situation of the various members of society will become the best possible."

"M. de Molinari had a very true and penetrating perception of events."

"Only his early death had prevented Frédéric Bastiat from writing a treatise on “social harmonies” — as a follow-up work on his Economic Harmonies (1850). But his follower Gustave de Molinari published a great number of monographs dealing with virtually all of the contemporary social and political problems of France, as well as with fundamental problems of social interpretation and with the sociology of religion. His writings had a decisive impact on one of the greatest champions of the new marginal-utility approach. The Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto was a disciple of Léon Walras and a great admirer of Gustave de Molinari. Right from his first systematic exposition of economic science in Cours d'Economie Politique (1896), Pareto applied Walrasian techniques of analysis to Molinarian themes. He applied marginal-utility theory and the theory of general equilibrium to explain spoliation, aristocracy and the circulation of elites, economic interests and class struggle, and the relationship between doctrines and social science."

"The most "extreme" and consistent, as well as the longest-lived and most prolific of the French laissez-faire economists was the Belgian-born Gustave de Molinari (1819–1912), who edited the Journal des Economistes for several decades."

"The initial article of the young Molinari, here translated for the first time as "The Production of Security," was the first presentation anywhere in human history of what is now called "anarcho-capitalism" or "free market anarchism." Molinari did not use the terminology, and probably would have balked at the name. In contrast to all previous individualistic and near-anarchistic thinkers, such as La Boétie, Hodgskin or the young Fichte, Molinari did not base the brunt of his argument on a moral opposition to the State. While an ardent individualist, Molinari grounded his argument on free-market, laissez-faire economics, and proceeded logically to ask the question: If the free market can and should supply all other goods and services, why not also the services of protection?"

"The dean of the laissez-faire French economists in the last decades of the nineteenth century and virtually until his death in 1911 was the Belgian-born Gustave de Molinari. Molinari is most famous for his doctrine of “competing governments” — he has been called “the first anarcho-capitalist” — and while he allegedly modified his position in later years, there is no doubt that he was always an unbending advocate of laissez-faire."

"Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Born, Pauli, De Broglie, Dirac, the leading lights of the quantum revolution, are all there in that picture."

"We are always haunted by the question of not choosing the other path, the road not taken…Travelling is always about making choices, but at the same time your choices are made for you, structured by many things: nationality, class, gender, what we can access and what not. We’re walking on a map that already exists and our location on the map has been decided."

"In order to fit into certain ideals, you need to mutilate yourself."

"We can decide where to go but we’re not really free…I like having this idea of multiple selves and multiple circumstances. Because that’s what we are."

"…I thought it was important to resist. That’s why I wanted to tell stories about bad women. Feminism, though, was much less appealing than in today's conservative Indonesia. Even progressive male thinkers tend to see feminism in Indonesia as irrelevant, disruptive, or merely a copycat of Western feminism."

"…My fiction is also influenced by women intellectuals such as Melani Budianta and Julia Suryakusuma. I love the works of male writers such as Asrul Sani, Budi Darma’s Orang-orang Bloomington (The People of Bloomington), and Moetinggo Boesje’s play Malam Jahanam (The Night of the Accursed), but my priority now is to learn more about writings by women. Just like in many Western countries, the practice of defining literature has often excluded or ignored women’s writings and their contexts."

"The tree laden with fruits is always a bit bent. Not because of any burden but because it has something to offer."

"The kingdom of consciousness is under siege by the desires of our mind."

"When you forgive, somewhere you sacrifice a part of your own existence, your respect, your dignity, yourself."

"Nothing is impossible for the one who treads the path of meditation"

"Thoughts that you do not let go leave an imprint on your mind. That imprint is the residue. Meditation is the process of washing away that residue. It is the cleaning of your slate and keeping it that way. When we fail to abandon our thoughts, they assume different forms. They can become desires, expectations or emotions."

"Just like two pieces of wood can be rubbed together to produce fire and the same fire later consumes them both, intellect and concentration support the contemplative meditation. But when the fire of insight arises, it consumes both intellect and concentration, giving way to pristine awareness."

"Ultimately, it's not about meditation or belief in some scripture or religion, it's about flowing with the river of life, it's about living with compassion and gratitude."

"“Love has only a beginning, It has no end.”"

"“I have no friend except my Beloved, I have no work except his love.”"

"“When the flowers of the church, mosque and temple gather together, Spring will blossom forth in your garden, O Lord.”"

"“All places of worship are symbols of the One Beloved. Bow your head when you see a temple, and salute when you see a mosque.”"

"“We are communing with the moon and the stars, But alas, we have not reached the heart of our neighbor.”"

"“O Cupbearer, let those long divided embrace one another, And through the intoxication of your love, make all mankind truly human.”"

"“Embrace every man as your very own, And shower your love freely wherever you go.”"

"“What does is matter if I am called a man? In truth, I am the very soul of love, The entire earth is my home, and the universe my country.”"

"In any case, I am a rock-hard racist, sadist and fascist. That is what I enjoy. Mercy is sickness."

"I don't shoot Aryans. But if someone else comes..."

"We have many sympathisers in the police force. Our activities are also accepted by many in the Finnish army."

"The magnums are always ready here."

"This racial hatred does not extend to the gypsies and Jews living in Finland, only to those filthy mud-noses who are being imported here to live off of our money so that we are impoverished as a result."

"All kinds of hula-hula niggers, half-naked midgets and other savages have taken millions' worth of donations from the Finnish government."

"Jungle peoples lack knowledge or any talent to speak of."

"I think it is very wrong that those mud-noses are being brought here. All they do is rape our women, spread AIDS and steal and rob."

"My mother used to say that women usually need a stupid man with a lot of money and a long penis."

"In about 10 to 15 years, the United States will have a black majority, and whites will be brought down to the position of a downtrodden people."

"Hobbies: women, vodka, weapons"

"I believe that we should send all the refugee niggers to Lapland for snow work. Santa needs black elves, too. It is equality."

"Extreme movements aren't really popular right now, but they are still a necessary evil in this climate."

"I'm also a clairvoyant, I can make predictions, but I'm by no means a Nazi clown even though that's what the Communists are claiming."

"I have never boiled cats myself, nor have I urged anyone to, that was an old ritual I was talking about in [my book] Black Magic. Someone I knew did boil cats alive. I, too, have two cats at my home in Vehmaa and they are my good friends."

"I am a debauchee, I am a pervert. My mother wished for me to become a theologist, but I became a filthologist."

"Great men like Adolf Hitler are only born once in a hundred years. I must admit that Franco was more successful than Hitler, but we need to take into account that fascism and national socialism are two different things. They should never be confused with each other."

"Heil Hitler."

"[Interviewer: Do you, Pekka Siitoin, believe that there will some day be Nazi rule in Finland?] Certainly."

"[Interviewer: This was very scary.] Thank you, as it should be."

"When ten million Russians come over the border, we won't even have enough ammunition to repel them."

"Send the unemployed to concentration camps. Racial mixing is a very bad thing. Suspend the right to strike."

"I was an only child. An adopted child is more beloved than a biological one. I was treated like an emperor. I had a fine upbringing, like a prince."

"[Interviewer: Do you consider yourself a patriotic man?] Yes, and I'm also a racist."

"Winston Churchill was homosexual. Juden agent, Churchill."

"Terrible tricks should be done to conscientious objectors. Concentration camp, half a year, forced labour."

"I've been to the theaters and prisons, I've seen gays and lesbians... it's horrible. Doing others in the ass, then a diarrhea-soaked dick comes out. It's disgusting."

"We may be forced to take action to abolish his organisation because of a few lunatics. But there is no reason to hurry. Siitoinen's [sic] senility could stop by itself. It could also continue, in which case we should intervene, even for other countries' sake. But don't hurry."

"Foreigners are probably saying that we're allowing a fascist party to exist."

"Finland has produced lot [sic] of lunatics and highly original characters. Pekka Siitoin was one of them."

"The hen knows the sun has risen and yet lets the rooster sing"

"The statement of a certain number of clichés borrowed from colonial ethnology, which contribute to a denial of the existence of an African history."

"I asked all African historians, each in their own specialty, to write an article on one of the themes mentioned by President Sarkozy.."

"Enormously. They come from both ordinary citizens and African and French intellectuals."

"I contacted institutions such as the Association of African Historians or the Council for the Development of Social Science Research (Codesria)."

"I don't believe it. During his electoral campaign, Nicolas Sarkozy did not stop calling on people to express themselves freely."

"When a woman evolves, she gives permission to her community to do the same."

""I haven’t always excelled to be honest and really want young people in Nigeria to understand that success is not a straight line"."

""If you are not meant to be doing a job, it is better that you find out sooner than later so that you can make the appropriate changes"."

""Find something that you can offer that few people can also offer"."

""It wasn't the easiest childhood, but it prepared me for real life"."

"" I would take the childhood that I got every single time"."

"„Paradox: When our neocortex, the intellectual part of the brain, is merely a servant in the hands of the animal part of the brain.“"

"„We are an animal that has acquired the ability to perceive that it is an animal.“"

"„Paradox: We don’t have strong enough willpower to have free will.“"

"„Who knows, maybe it's totally awesome after death. We just don't know, so we are afraid, and so we often try to hold on here 'tooth and nail'.“"

"„Paradox: We harm children in the long run by wanting to help them (out of love or short-term convenience).“"

"„A healthy body, with the help of oxytocin and other hormones, creates very intense feelings towards the offspring. Long-term feelings, strong enough to have us feel an endless need to protect the child throughout life, even at the cost of our own. Thanks to these feelings, however, we protect them not only from the environment and its own indiscretions, but often also from ourselves, and therefore from actions stemming from our emotions.“"

"„Want to be a good parent? Be a good person!“"

"„If you want to take proper care of others, you must first take proper care of yourself.“"

"„The expectation that someone else will, in the long run, make us happy is the perfect way to end up unhappy.“"

"„We are often but slaves to the feelings our own body subjects us to.“"

"„The male body, for example, is specific in terms of its participation in the reproductive process because of its relative simplicity, but above all its speed. After all, the phrase 'he lasted three whole minutes' didn’t just come about by accident.“"

"„Being sexually attracted to someone does not guarantee that they will be a suitable life partner.“"

"„Paradox: These feelings of jealousy are triggered by the body trying to protect us from potentially losing our partner. However, the way excessive jealousy manifests itself ends up driving our partner away.“"

"„Paradox: While we want to control the other person's every move, or even every thought, we ourselves often desire freedom and liberty.“"

"„So we often use the intellectual part of the brain to fulfil the wishes of the animal part.“"

"„So, life is often very difficult, and we can mainly be content with how we managed to live that difficult life.“"

"„And if you think you've messed up everything you possibly could have? If you believe in reincarnation, you can at least console yourself with the idea that, in the next life, you will try again and do it better. That is, if you're 'lucky' enough to come back here as a human and not as, say, a Thanksgiving turkey.“"

"„Life begins > I lie down > I can't walk > I can't control excretion > can’t control excretion > can't walk > I lie down > life ends“"

"„Give an animal better intelligence and you get man.“"

"„Let's live in a way so that we don't have to be afraid to die!“"

"I believe that if we unlock the leadership potential of African women and girls,we can change them into compassionate change makers who will improve not only their circumstances but the circumstances of others."

"Because of the success of these training programs,I now serve as a leadership consultant to UN women working currently with South Sudan office to design leadership curricula to economically empower women and raise them as leaders in peace Building."

"“First, you must never let laughter stop you… People will always have opinions of what you do and who you are, but you can’t let their opinions and their laughter stop you… Second, don’t let people steal your voice. Your voice is your power.”"

"“You cannot be your best self by yourself. None of us was created to be an island. You need those circles: who’s behind you, who’s with you, who’s ahead of you. You need to seek out mentors, coaches, and counsellors, and don’t be afraid to invest in yourself.”"

"“I saw a platform that I felt I could lead, and I went with everything that I had… I had been on this journey to stop being afraid of the things I was innately attracted to.”"

"“For a lot of women, as we advance in leadership, we become so isolated and there’s no one to bounce anything off… No matter how rough the journey is, if you’re building your relationships with people behind you, with you, and ahead of you, then you’re not isolating yourself and you’ll have enough people around you to give you what you need.”"

"“I’m not sure that any continent feels ready for women that are fearless. I’m not sure that we need people to be ready. I think that you show up. The more fearless women that emerge, the more we normalize ourselves.”"

"One day, my mother said we were going to the cinema. And I found myself the victim of a horror movie, an unimaginable trauma that I had never managed to talk about, until I found love and wrote In My Flesh"

"I embodied the most arrogant and admired kind of femininity, I who was supposed to be diminished"

"Let's draw attention to the religious, medical, psychological and social realities of this ancestral practice"

"I was inflicted – with no anaesthetic, of course – this very private and irreversible mutilation in the name of ancestral custom"

"I was dragged away by the old hag in a plane whose doors closed behind me like those of a safe: or a tomb. After my mutilation, this kidnapping was for me a second death"

"As I had grown into a young woman she says, I could no longer bear the authority of the very one who did not protect me. I had only one desire: to go away, from my mother, my family, my country"

"As I am reaching the halfway mark in my life she says, I am full of projects and hope to bring them to fruition in my land of birth. Africa is looking forward... but for the time being, serenely, I cherish the pleasure to be back home, looking at the silvery sea like Ulysses after his long, eventful journey home"

"Many times, we do things, but we don't realize how many people we touch. Reflect on this question, “Who will cry when you die?”"

"If you know who you are as a person, that's the beginning of getting what you want in life."

"The greatest injustice facing Africa is the failure of the education system to empower our people as leaders."

"Your background doesn't shape your destiny. You have the power to design the future you want."

"Africa has positive stories to tell the world. We need to document those stories."

"How far you go into the world is determined by your attitude."

"You can't lead unless you know other people around you. You can't lead unless you know who you are."

"Leadership is like a candle. One can light many without losing its glow, but together they create more light."

"Everyone has their own baggage, but we can't bring our baggage to the table as leaders."

"If I had proper guidance, support networks and self belief, my journey would have been simpler and better."

"When you have a candle in your hand and light another person’s candle, yours will never loss its glow but together you will have better light and heat"

"I was born a village girl, but I did not become a village woman"

"“Where there is no reflection, there is manipulation.”"

"“Any ideology that threatens with punishment those who reject it is perverse and deserves to be rejected.”"

"“There is no greater pleasure than to be a freethinker.”"

"“One of the principal reasons why so many people believe the evidently fantastic stories of the Bible is the fact that it’s an ancient book. If it had been written these days, an overwhelming majority would not think twice before considering it a work of fiction.”"

"“Unless we are children, or retards, when we are told a story we instinctively feel whether it’s plausible or fanciful. Instinctively, Christians feel that the stories told by the holy books of other religions are fantastical. Yet, as incredible as it seems, they don’t sense the smell of fantasy of the stories told by their own holy book, more or less like someone who is used to his own foot odor.”"

"“Those who believe in a supernatural being can’t have difficulty believing in other supernatural beings, such as angels, demons, witches, spirits, ghosts, apparitions and hauntings, nor in superstitions, conspiracy theories and folkloric figures, such as the Headless Mule, by the way a legend based on a woman who supposedly was cursed by God. Those who believe in God cannot find it wrong to believe in the existence, for example, of the Werewolf and Chupacabra, since they can very well be diabolical manifestations. Christians and Muslims are fully convinced that demons exist. On what rational basis could they, then, contest the existence, for example, of vampires? In contrast, a person who doesn’t believe in deities and demons is immune to all kinds of old wives’ tales.”"

"“How many pieces of evidence are needed to recognize that the Creator of the Universe either doesn’t exist or doesn’t give a damn about his creation? For me, one is sufficient: churches that collapse on believers during worship service.”"

"“Some more than others, but all religions are dictatorships of thought, because they dictate how their adherents must think, what they can accept and what they must reject.”"

"“Religion is the illusion of having answers to questions to which no one has answers.”"

"“I’m not against God existing. I just have no reasons to believe that he exists. Believing is not a virtue. I’m not able to accept incoherences, nor do I know why I should. If what is incoherent deserves to be rejected, how much more what is perverse!”"

"“If Humanity can be saved and this Pale Blue Dot transformed into a really good place to live, at least without poverty and wars, then not by people who see life as worthless and spend it dreaming of mansions of gold in an imaginary world, but by people who don’t flee from reality and are guided not by primitive mythological beings, but by reason: freethinkers.”"

"“I don’t want to believe, I want to know.”"

"“Next to the history of Christianity, the scariest horror movie is comedy.”"

"“Isn’t it ironic that religious freedom comes precisely from secularism, that is, from vetoing the intrusion of religion into politics?”"

"“Yahweh is comparable to the powerful boss of a mafia clan who spreads fear through threats, violence and murder in order to gain power, control and respect. Of what value are worship and obedience out of fear? Taking pleasure in this kind of devotion is typical of dictators.”"

"“In addition to torture (the scourge of Christ) and cannibalism (drinking the blood and eating the flesh of Christ, the ritual known as the Holy Communion), it’s indisputable that Christianity is founded on human sacrifice and filicide. What is the Son’s death on the cross, if not human sacrifice to placate the Father’s wrath?”"

"“If life on Earth is evidence of God’s existence, the absence of life on seven planets and five dwarf planets wins 12 to 1 as evidence of his nonexistence.”"

"“We were born atheists. Therefore, it’s normal to be an atheist. If we were born believing in God, that is, knowing that God exists, there would be only one god and everyone would worship him.”"

"“To exist, religions need religious freedom, but religious freedom can exist only where what religions fight against is permitted: disbelief. After all, believers too are disbelievers: they disbelieve other religions. Religions combating disbelief is, therefore, schizophrenia and self-destruction. Instead of threatening them with Hell and trying to convert them, Christians should thank God for the existence of skeptics, doubters, disbelievers, infidels, blasphemers and atheists.”"

"“Either God is love or he is not. If he is love, he cannot punish his creatures just for not believing in him.”"

"“I find it extremely unlikely that God exists. Yet, if he does exist, let him exist! So what? If God exists, it’s not necessary to believe in him, and if he doesn’t, much less.”"

"“The gods of religions are ridiculous, there is no evidence, let alone convincing, that God exists and, in and of itself, the idea of God doesn’t even make sense. Believing in God is, therefore, a tremendous waste of time (and, if you are a church member, money).”"

"Embrace your potential, seek out allies, and never underestimate the impact of your presence. Your journey may have its twists and turns, but remember, within every challenge lies an opportunity for greatness"

"“The technology industry is one of the fastest growing industries in the world. As a result of this fast growth there is the need to attract top talent and that requires a diverse group of resources to attract such talent. Diverse teams are more creative and bring different perspectives on how to solve problems. So it’s not surprising that there is a strong correlation between diverse companies and strong financial results. When the employees of an organization better represent their current users and target users, they will develop better technology for those users.”"

"Create Options for Yourself"

"Surround Yourself with Positive People"

"Be a Boss. Think Like an Owner"

"first of all you should never think of yourself as being different from anybody else. And that’s one of the most empowering things that I think that anyone can do, is that you’re entitled to the same opportunities as anybody else and I think that that change in mindset is very empowering"

"You’re making your journey, definitely help other people along the way with their journey. To teach is to lead and to learn, and I think that that’s an important thing that people should always continue throughout their career. Not only are you helping somebody within their journey, but you’re also getting something out if it in terms of developing your leadership capabilities – and that’s a wonderful way to give back to an organization"

"One should never be afraid to take a risk and really just give it a go and try something new, a completely different experience"

"You made it, graduates! You finished the tutorial level! You know how to work the controls. The game of life doesn’t come with a clear mission so you’re in explore mode now. Or survival mode depending on how you’re feeling."

"I get that the world may not feel like your oyster. And I’m not going to tell you that everything is going to be okay. But I am going to get specific about the benefits of approaching life with optimism, excitement, humility, and curiosity."

"Not because things can’t go wrong but because the rest of your life - this thing you’re about to go make - is the ultimate act of creation. And the mindset you bring to that creation process will determine the journey you create and how you experience that journey. Getting your mindset right is the hardest and most rewarding thing you will ever do, and it takes a lifetime to get right."

"The Fool is setting out on an adventure, looking up as he steps off of a literal cliff into the figurative unknown. With almost no belongings, no protection, no idea where the journey will take him. Seeing the unknowns not as something to be avoided or controlled but as itself the source of the magic to be found. The essence of The Fool is potential. Just like each of you in this moment."

"Learning to embrace being The Fool is not all-or-nothing. You can ramp into it, starting with smaller bites if that helps you get started."

"Your annoying classmate who asked a lot of “stupid” questions—they might just have been strengthening their understanding of the fundamentals and not worried about how it sounded when they ask. Being The Fool in a smaller way at first."

"Made-Up Minds addresses fundamental questions of learning and concept invention by means of an innovative computer program that is based on the cognitive-developmental theory of psychologist Jean Piaget. Drescher uses Piaget’s theory as a source of inspiration for the design of an artificial cognitive system called the schema mechanism, and then uses the system to elaborate and test Piaget’s theory. The approach is original enough that readers need not have extensive knowledge of artificial intelligence, and a chapter summarizing Piaget assists readers who lack a background in developmental psychology."

"The schema mechanism learns from its experiences, expressing discoveries in its existing representational vocabulary and extending that vocabulary with new concepts. A novel empirical learning technique, marginal attribution, can find results of an action that are obscure because each occurs rarely in general, although reliably under certain conditions. Drescher shows that several early milestones in the Piagetian infant’s invention of the concept of persistent object can be replicated by the schema mechanism."

"Many scientists suspect that the universe can ultimately be described by a simple (perhaps even deterministic) formalism; all that is real unfolds mechanically according to that formalism. But how, then, is it possible for us to be conscious, or to make genuine choices? And how can there be an ethical dimension to such choices? Drescher sketches computational models of consciousness, choice, and subjunctive reasoning—what would happen if this or that were to occur?—to show how such phenomena are compatible with a mechanical, even deterministic universe. Analyses of Newcomb’s Problem (a paradox about choice) and the Prisoner’s Dilemma (a paradox about self-interest vs. altruism, arguably reducible to Newcomb’s Problem) help bring the problems and proposed solutions into focus. Regarding quantum mechanics, Drescher builds on Everett’s relative-state formulation—but presents a simplified formalism, accessible to laypersons—to argue that, contrary to some popular impressions, quantum mechanics is compatible with an objective, deterministic physical reality, and that there is no special connection between quantum phenomena and consciousness."