Non-fiction authors from Austria

"(Speech of Freud before the B'nai B'rith) I soon convinced myself that I owed to my nature as a Jew alone the two qualities that had become indispensable to me in the course of my difficult life. As a Jew, I found myself free of many of those prejudices that limit other men in the use of their intellect and, as a Jew, I found myself ready to go over to the opposition and to renounce agreement with the 'silent majority'. So I became one of yours; I took part in your humanitarian and national interests, made friends among you and later convinced the few friends I had left (Dr Hitschmarm and Dr Rie) to join you. It is not that I wanted to win you over to my teachings, but at a time when no one in Europe listened to you accorded me benevolent attention. You were my first audience."

"How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved."

"Woe to you, my Princess, when I come... you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle girl who doesn't eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body."

"Princess, my little Princess, Oh, how wonderful it will be! I am coming with money and staying a long time and bringing something beautiful for you and then go on to Paris and become a great scholar and then come back to Vienna with a huge, enormous halo, and then we will soon get married, and I will cure all the incurable nervous cases and through you I shall be healthy and I will go on kissing you till you are strong and gay and happy — and "if they haven't died, they are still alive today.""

"A man like me cannot live without a hobby-horse, a consuming passion — in Schiller's words a tyrant. I have found my tyrant, and in his service I know no limits. My tyrant is psychology. it has always been my distant, beckoning goal and now since I have hit upon the neuroses, it has come so much the nearer."

"I do not doubt that it would be easier for fate to take away your suffering than it would for me. But you will see for yourself that much has been gained if we succeed in turning your hysterical misery into common unhappiness."

"Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise."

"I do not in the least underestimate bisexuality. . . I expect it to provide all further enlightenment."

"In the following pages, I shall demonstrate that there exists a psychological technique by which dreams may be interpreted and that upon the application of this method every dream will show itself to be a senseful psychological structure which may be introduced into an assignable place in the psychic activity of the waking state. I shall furthermore endeavor to explain the processes which give rise to the strangeness and obscurity of the dream, and to discover through them the psychic forces, which operate whether in combination or opposition, to produce the dream. This accomplished by investigation will terminate as it will reach the point where the problem of the dream meets broader problems, the solution of which must be attempted through other material."

"A woman is to soften but not weaken a man."

"I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador — an adventurer, if you want it translated — with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort."

"The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind."

"And now, the main thing! As far as I can see, my next work will be called "Human Bisexuality." It will go to the root of the problem and say the last word it may be granted to say — the last and the most profound."

"No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human beast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed."

"He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore."

"A person who feels pleasure in producing pain in someone else in a sexual relationship is also capable of enjoying as pleasure any pain which he may himself derive from sexual relations. A sadist is always at the same time a masochist."

"Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love."

"Moreover, the act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety."

"We have long observed that every neurosis has the result, and therefore probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from actuality."

"The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life."

"Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us."

"At bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father."

"Psychoanalysis ... should find a place among the methods whose aim is to bring about the highest ethical and intellectual development of the individual."

"The psychic development of the individual is a short repetition of the course of development of the race."

"The ego is not master in its own house."

"Wenn man der unbestrittene Liebling der Mutter gewesen ist, so behält man fürs Leben jenes Eroberergefühl, jene Zuversicht des Erfolges, welche nicht selten wirklich den Erfolg nach sich zieht."

"Cruel though it may sound, we must see to it that the patient's suffering, to a degree that is in some way or other effective, does not come to an end prematurely. If, owing to the symptoms having been taken apart and having lost their value, his suffering becomes mitigated, we must re-instate it elsewhere in the form of some appreciable privation; otherwise we run the danger of never achieving any improvements except quite insignificant and transitory ones"

"We are and remain Jews. The others will only exploit us and will never understand and appreciate us."

"Biology is truly a land of unlimited possibilities. We may expect it to give us the most surprising information, and we cannot guess what answers it will return in a few dozen years. ...They may be of a kind which will blow away the whole of our artificial structure of hypothesis."

"The unconscious is the larger circle which includes within itself the smaller circle of the conscious; everything conscious has its preliminary step in the unconscious, whereas the unconscious may stop with this step and still claim full value as a psychic activity. Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psychic; its inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs."

"The common characteristic of all perversions, on the other hand, is that they have abandoned reproduction as their aim. We term sexual activity perverse when it has renounced the aim of reproduction and follows the pursuit of pleasure as an independent goal. And so you realize that the turning point in the development of sexual life lies in its subjugation to the purpose of reproduction. Everything this side of the turning point, everything that has given up this purpose and serves the pursuit of pleasure alone, must carry the term "perverse" and as such be regarded with contempt."

"Cruelty and intolerance to those who do not belong to it are natural to every religion."

"We read in Rabelais of how the Devil took flight when the woman showed him her vulva."

"Wer verliebt ist, ist demütig. Wer liebt, hat sozusagen ein Stück seines Narzißmus eingebüßt."

"Die Anatomie ist das Schicksal"

"When the wayfarer whistles in the dark, he may be disavowing his timidity, but he does not see any more clearly for doing so."

"The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied."

"It is easy to see that the ego is that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world."

"The ego represents what we call reason and sanity, in contrast to the id which contains the passions."

"The functional importance of the ego is manifested in the fact that normally control over the approaches to motility devolves upon it. Thus in its relation to the id it is like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse; with this difference, that the rider tries to do so with his own strength while the ego uses borrowed forces. The analogy may be carried a little further. Often a rider, if he is not to be parted from his horse, is obliged to guide it where it wants to go; so in the same way the ego is in the habit of transforming the id's will into action as if it were its own."

"The sexual wishes in regard to the mother become more intense and the father is perceived as an obstacle to the mother; this gives rise to the Oedipus complex."

"We obtain our concept of the unconscious, therefore, from the theory of repression … We see, however that we have two kinds of unconscious — that which is latent but capable of becoming conscious, and that which is repressed and not capable of becoming conscious in the ordinary way."

"If the truth of religious doctrines is dependent on an inner experience that bears witness to the truth, what is one to make of the many people who do not have that experience?"

"The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing. Ultimately, after endlessly repeated rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points in which it may be optimistic about the future of mankind, but in itself it signifies not a little."

"Es braucht nicht gesagt zu werden, daß eine Kultur, welche eine so große Zahl von Teilnehmern unbefriedigt läßt und zur Auflehnung treibt, weder Aussicht hat, sich dauernd zu erhalten, noch es verdient."

"Religious ideas have sprung from the same need as all the other achievements of culture: from the necessity for defending itself against the crushing supremacy of nature."

"A poor girl may have an illusion that a prince will come and fetch her home. It is possible, some such cases have occurred. That the Messiah will come and found a golden age is much less probable."

"Religious doctrines … are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them."

"Where the questions of religion are concerned people are guilty of every possible kind of insincerity and intellectual misdemeanor."

"Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion."

"Our knowledge of the historical worth of certain religious doctrines increases our respect for them, but does not invalidate our proposal that they should cease to be put forward as the reasons for the precepts of civilization. On the contrary! Those historical residues have helped us to view religious teachings, as it were, as neurotic relics, and we may now argue that the time has probably come, as it does in an analytic treatment, for replacing the effects of repression by the results of the rational operation of the intellect."

"The true believer is in a high degree protected against the danger of certain neurotic afflictions, by accepting the universal neurosis he is spared the task of forming a personal neurosis."

"In so doing, the idea forces itself upon him that religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis, and he is optimistic enough to suppose that mankind will surmount this neurotic phase, just as so many children grow out of their similar neurosis."

"Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. Religion's eleventh commandment is "Thou shalt not question.""

"But man's helplessness remains and along with it his longing for his father, and the gods. The gods retain their threefold task: they must exorcise the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them."

"Man kann sich des Eindrucks nicht erwehren, daß die Menschen gemeinhin mit falschen Maßstäben messen, Macht, Erfolg und Reichtum für sich anstreben und bei anderen bewundern, die wahren Werte des Lebens aber unterschätzen."

"Towards the outside, at any rate, the ego seems to maintain clear and sharp lines of demarcation. There is only one state — admittedly an unusual state, but not one that can be stigmatized as pathological — in which it does not do this. At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that "I" and "you" are one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact."

"One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be "happy" is not included in the plan of "Creation.""

"Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it."

"We are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love."

"The element of truth behind all this, which people are so ready to disavow, is that men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus. Who, in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?"

"The first requisite of civilization, therefore, is that of justice—that is, the assurance that a law once made will not be broken in favour of an individual."

"I cannot inquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognize that the psychological premisses on which the [system]] is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments, certainly a strong one, though certainly not the strongest, but we have not altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness, nor have we altered anything in its nature. Aggressiveness was not created by property. It reigned almost without limit in primitive times, when property was still very scanty, and it already shows itself in the nursery almost before property has given up its primal, anal form; it forms the basis of every relation of affection and love among people (with the single exception, perhaps, of the mother's relations to her male child)."

"It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive manifestations of their aggressiveness."

"In some place in my soul, in a very hidden corner, I am a fanatical Jew. I am very much astonished to discover myself as such in spite of all efforts to be unprejudiced and impartial. What can I do against it at my age?"

"What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books."

"Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness."

"A man's heterosexuality will not put up with any homosexuality, and vice versa."

"Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the average. His ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent."

"The Mosaic religion had been a Father religion; Christianity became a Son religion. The old God, the Father, took second place; Christ, the Son, stood in His stead, just as in those dark times every son had longed to do."

"Man found that he was faced with the acceptance of "spiritual" forces, that is to say such forces as cannot be comprehended by the senses, particularly not by sight, and yet having undoubted, even extremely strong, effects. If we may trust to language, it was the movement of the air that provided the image of spirituality, since the spirit borrows its name from the breath of wind (animus, spiritus, Hebrew: ruach = smoke). The idea of the soul was thus born as the spiritual principle in the individual. Observation found the breath of air again in the human breath, which ceases with death; even today we talk of a dying man breathing his last. Now the realm of spirits had opened for man, and he was ready to endow everything in nature with the soul he had discovered in himself."

"It often seems that the poet's derisive comment is not unjustified when he says of the philosopher: "With his nightcaps and the tatters of his dressing-gown he patches the gaps in the structure of the universe.""

"Analogies prove nothing, that is quite true, but they can make one feel more at home."

"The only bodily organ which is really regarded as inferior is the atrophied penis, a girls clitoris."

"One might compare the relation of the ego to the id with that between a rider and his horse. The horse provides the locomotor energy, and the rider has the prerogative of determining the goal and of guiding the movements of his powerful mount towards it. But all too often in the relations between the ego and the id we find a picture of the less ideal situation in which the rider is obliged to guide his horse in the direction in which it itself wants to go."

"The poor ego has a still harder time of it; it has to serve three harsh masters, and it has to do its best to reconcile the claims and demands of all three... The three tyrants are the external world, the superego, and the id."

"Where id is, there shall ego be."

"Thinking is an experimental dealing with small quantities of energy, just as a general moves miniature figures over a map before setting his troops in action."

"If one wishes to form a true estimate of the full grandeur of religion, one must keep in mind what it undertakes to do for men. It gives them information about the source and origin of the universe, it assures them of protection and final happiness amid the changing vicissitudes of life, and it guides their thoughts and motions by means of precepts which are backed by the whole force of its authority."

"Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities."

"Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires."

"The expectation that every neurotic phenomenon can be cured may, I suspect, be derived from the layman's belief that the neuroses are something quite unnecessary which have no right whatever to exist. Whereas in fact they are severe, constitutionally fixed illnesses, which rarely restrict themselves to only a few attacks but persist as a rule over long periods throughout life."

"The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises."

"...three of life's most important areas: work, love, and taking responsibility."

"Was will das Weib?"

"America is a mistake, admittedly a gigantic mistake, but a mistake nevertheless."

"A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist."

"I have found little that is "good" about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud or perhaps even think."

"Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me."

"Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies, quite unlike people, who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate in their object-relations."

"I don't rack my brains much over the subject of good and evil, but, on average, I haven't discovered much 'good' in men. Based on what I know of them, they are for the most part nothing but scoundrels."

"A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity."

"Sometimes a Cigar Is Just a Cigar."

"This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever."

"Time spent with cats is never wasted."

"The idea of a God was not a lie but a device of the unconscious which needed to be decoded by psychology. A personal god was nothing more than an exalted father-figure: desire for such a deity sprang from infantile yearnings for a powerful, protective father, for justice and fairness and for life to go on forever. God is simply a projection of these desires, feared and worshiped by human beings out of an abiding sense of helplessness. Religion belonged to the infancy of the human race; it had been a necessary stage in the transition from childhood to maturity. It had promoted ethical values which were essential to society. Now that humanity had come of age, however, it should be left behind."

"The mind is like an iceberg."

"Women oppose change, receive passively, and add nothing of their own"

"The formation of a lesbian (and gay) identity, divested of Freudian origin, is in process. (p 119)"

"In thinking through her body, as Adrienne Rich put it, she challenged Freud's certainty of inner and outer spaces as polar opposites. This concept informs many of Freud's theoretical constructs and especially those about the ego. (Likewise, in popular culture at the time of Freud's work, women were assigned an inner space corresponding to the home-and-hearth, cult-of-true-womanhood ideology of the nineteenth century.) Rich wrote: "As the inhabitant of a female body... in pregnancy I [did not] experience the embryo as decisively internal in Freud's terms, but rather as something inside of me, yet becoming separate from me and of-itself. ... The child I carry for nine months can be defined neither as me or as not-me. Far from existing in the mode of 'inner' space women are powerfully attuned both to 'inner' and 'outer' because for us the two are continuous, not polar.""

"If often he was wrong and at times absurd To us he is no more a person Now but a climate of opinion."

"When Freud turned his searing eye to socialism he saw a delusional philosophy […] To Freud, the communists of the twentieth century were engaged in a perfectionist political project […] The central flaw Freud identified in socialist doctrine was the idea that private property is the primary, if not the sole, source of man’s depravity. With this foundational idea, socialists were able to say that man could be redeemed if, and only if, the institution of private property were abolished and replaced by a kinder, more humane system. [To Freud,] Man’s “depravity” is rooted much deeper in his nature and the abolition of private property would do little or nothing to change his basic constitution. [Freud argued that] socialism has its roots not in love and fraternity, as the socialists themselves would have us believe, but rather in revenge and aggression. According to Freud, “It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness” (Freud 1961, 72). Freud pointed to nascent Soviet Russia as evidence of this phenomenon: “it is intelligible that the attempt to establish a new, communist civilization in Russia should find its psychological support in the persecution of the bourgeois. One only wonders, with concern, what the Soviets will do after they have wiped out their bourgeois.”"

"At the core of Freud’s initial theory of psychoanalysis was his proposal of the instinctual system, which included two fundamental classes of instincts. The first were the life-preservative instincts. These included the needs for air, food, water, and shelter and the fears of snakes, heights, and dangerous humans. These instincts served the function of survival. Freud’s second major class of motivators consisted of the sexual instincts. “Mature sexuality” for Freud culminated in the final stage of adult development—the genital stage, which led directly to reproduction, the essential feature of Freud’s mature sexuality. Astute readers might sense an eerie familiarity. Freud’s two major classes of instincts correspond almost precisely to Darwin’s two major theories of evolution. Freud’s life-preservative instincts correspond to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which many refer to as “survival selection.” And his theory of the sexual instincts corresponds closely to Darwin’s theory of sexual selection. Freud eventually changed his theory by combining the life and sexual instincts into one group called the “life instincts” and adding a second instinct known as the “death instinct.” He sought to establish psychology as an autonomous discipline, and his thinking moved away from its initial Darwinian anchoring."

"I have become increasingly convinced that some of the popular methods presumed to discover what is in the unconscious cannot be counted upon as reliable methods of obtaining evidence. They often involve the use of symbolism and analogy in such a way that the interpreter can find virtually anything that he is looking for. Freud, for instance, from a simple dream reported by a man in his middle twenties [i.e., Sergei Pankejeff ] as having occurred at 4 years of age drew remarkable conclusions. The 4-year-old boy dreamed of seeing six or seven white wolves sitting in a tree. Freud interpreted the dream in such a way as to convince himself that the patient at 18 months of age had been shocked by seeing his parents have intercourse three times in succession and that this played a major part in the extreme fear of being castrated by his father which Freud ascribed to him at 4 years of age. No objective evidence was ever offered to support this conclusion. Nor was actual fear of castration ever made to emerge into the light of consciousness despite years of analysis."

"In the early twentieth century the concepts of the preconscious and unconscious were made widely popular, especially in literary circles, by Freud, Jung, and their associates, mainly because of the sexual flavor they gave to them. By modern standards, Freud can hardly be regarded as a scientist but rather as a physician who had many novel ideas and who wrote persuasively and unusually well. He became the main founder of the new cult of psychoanalysis."

"A few professional alienists understood his importance, but to most of the public he appeared as some kind of German sexologist, an exponent of free love who used big words to talk about dirty things. At least a decade would have to pass before Freud would have his revenge and see his ideas begin to destroy sex in America forever."

"A special reserve of my anger was directed at Freud (formerly one of my heroes) for having labeled women "neurotic" when they resisted their "natural" roles."

"He had a sharp vision; no illusions lulled him to sleep except for an often exaggerated faith in his own ideas."

"The pathologizing of variation in women's bodies is a deep bias endorsed by many psychological theorists, most certainly by Freud."

"The seventeenth-century Iroquois, as described by the Jesuit missionaries, practiced a dream psychotherapy that was remarkably similar to Freud's discoveries two hundred years later. The Iroquois recognized the existence of an unconscious, the force of unconscious desires, the way in which the conscious mind attempts to repress unpleasant thoughts, the emergence of unpleasant thoughts in dreams, and the mental and physical (psychosomatic) illnesses that may be caused by the frustration of unconscious desires. The Iroquois knew that their dreams did not deal in facts but rather in symbols. ...And one of the techniques employed by the Iroquois seers to uncover the latent meanings behind a dream was free association... The Iroquois faith in dreams... is only somewhat diminished after more than three hundred years. ...The conclusions are inevitable: Had Freud not discovered psychotherapy, then someone else would have."

"(Q: In "When Women Love Men" every woman who is sexually repressed would like to break those taboos and simply be sexually free.) If you read Freud or a little psychoanalysis, you know that society has to control that or there would be total anarchy. But everybody has the same desires."

"Freudianism has become, with its confessionals and penance, its proselytes and converts, with the millions spent on its upkeep, our modern Church. We attack only uneasily, for you never know, on the day of final judgement, whether might be right. Who can be sure that he is as healthy as he can get? Who is functioning at his highest capacity? And who not scared out of his wis? Who doesn't hate his mother and father? Who doesn't compete with his brother? What girl at some time did not wish she were a boy? And for those hardy souls who persist in their skepticism, there is always that dreadful persist in their skepticism, there is always that dreadful word resistance. They are the one who are sickest: it's obvious, they fight it so much."

"Freud captured the imagination of a whole continent and civilization for a good reason. Though on the surface inconsistent, illogical or "way out," his followers, with their cautious logic, their experiments and revisions have nothing comparable to say. Freudianism is so charted so impossible to repudiate because freud grasped the cruecail problem of moddern life: Sexuality."

"Freudianism and Feminism grew from the same soil. It is no accident that Freud began his work at the height of the early feminist movement. We underestimate today how important feminist ideas were at the time. [...] At the turn of the century, then, in social and political thinking, in literary and artistic culture, there was a tremendous ferment of ideas regarding sexuality, marriage and family, and women’s role. Freudianism was only one of the cultural products of this ferment. Both Freudianism and feminism came as reactions to one of the smuggest periods in Western civilization, the Victorian Era, characterized by its family-centredness, and thus its exaggerated sexual oppression and repression. Both movements signified awakening: but Freud was merely a diagnostician for what feminism purports to cure."

"Whether or not we can blame Freud personally, his failure to question society itself was responsible for massive confusion in the disciplines that grew up around this theory. Beset with the insurmountable problems that resulted from trying to put into practice a basic contradiction – the resolution of a problem within the environment that created it – his followers began to attack one component after another of his theory, until they had thrown the baby out with the bath."

"I believe Freud was talking about something real, though perhaps his ideas, taken literally, lead to absurdity – for his genius was poetic rather than scientific; his ideas are more valuable as metaphors than as literal truths."

"That human nature and society can have conflicting demands, and hence that a whole society can be sick, is an assumption which was made very explicitly by Freud, most extensively in his Civilization and Its Discontent. ...he arrives at the concept of "social neurosis." "If the evolution of civilization," he writes, "has such a far-reaching similarity with the development of an individual, and if the same methods are employed in both, would not the diagnosis be justified that many systems of civilization — or epics of it — possibly even the whole of humanity — have become 'neurotic' under the pressure of the civilizing trends?"

"Freud was one of the last representatives of Enlightenment philosophy. He genuinely believed in reason as the one strength man has and which alone could save him from confusion and decay."

"While the implications of Darwin’s views were threatening and unsettling, they were not quite so directly abrasive, not quite so unrespectable, as Freud’s views on infantile sexuality, the ubiquity of perversions, and the dynamic power of unconscious urges."

"While Darwin was satisfied with revising his work after further reflection and absorbing palpable hits by rational critics, while he trusted the passage of time and the weight of his argumentation, Freud orchestrated his wooing of the public mind through a loyal cadre of adherents, founded periodicals and wrote popularizations that would spread the authorized word, dominated international congresses of analysis until he felt too frail to attend them and after that through surrogates like his daughter Anna."

"Professor Bruhl was an old man with a feeble voice. The subjects he treated were mystifying to me. He talked of "Urnings," "Lesbians," and other strange topics. His hearers, too, were strange: feminine-looking men with coquettish manners and women distinctly masculine, with deep voices. They were certainly a peculiar assembly. Greater clarity in these matters came to me later on when I heard Sigmund Freud. His simplicity and earnestness and the brilliance of his mind combined to give one the feeling of being led out of a dark cellar into broad daylight. For the first time I grasped the full significance of sex repression and its effect on human thought and action. He helped me to understand myself, my own needs; and I also realized that only people of depraved minds could impugn the motives or find "impure" so great and fine a personality as Freud."

"But [William] Glen [a distinguished geologist and historian of science at the United States Geological Survey in Menlo Park, CA...] reminded me of the famous statement by Freud that I have often quoted in these essays: The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos."

"According to Freud, our best and highest aspirations are merely symptoms of neurosis. He defines genius as nothing more than sublimated sexual drives, and our subconscious as a sewer inhabited by monsters and vile incestuous desires."

"I am fascinated by the fact that thousands of people continue to idealize and defend [Freud] without really knowing anything about him as a person."

"The founder of modern religious existentialism and the founder of psychoanalysis could not have known one another. Kierkegaard died one half year before the birth of Freud, and it is very unlikely that Freud ever read any of Kierkegaard's works. Yet the two have much more in common than their lifelong preoccupation with the phenomenon of anxiety. The elucidation and treatment of the problem of anxiety in the works of both thinkers — who knew nothing of each other’s work — leads to most surprising results. They confirm each other in their conclusions; they criticize each other in their limitations; and they match each other perfectly."

"I differ from Freud in that I think that most dreams are neither obscure nor bowdlerized, but rather that they are transparent and unedited. They reveal clearly meaningful undisguised and often highly conflictual themes worthy of note by the dreamer (and any interpretive assistant). My position echoes Jung's notion of dreams as transparently meaningful and does away with any distinction between manifest and latent content."

"Your technique of treating your pupils like patients is a blunder. In that way you produce either slavish sons or impudent puppies... I am objective enough to see through your little trick"

"The idea that different aspects of visual perception might be handled in separate areas of the brain was predicted by Freud... when he proposed that the inability of certain patients to recognize certain features of the visual world was due not to a sensory deficit, but to a cortical defect that affected their ability to combine aspects of vision into a meaningful pattern. These defects, which Freud called agnosias (loss of knowledge), can be quite specific."

"The third great revolution, the Freudian revolution of Vienna 1900, revealed that we do not consciously control our own actions but are instead driven by unconscious motives. This... later led to the idea that human creativity... stems from conscious access to underlying, unconscious forces."

"The realization that our mental functioning is largely irrational was arrived at by several thinkers at the same time, including Friedrich Nietzsche... Freud, who was much influenced by both Darwin and Nietzsche... was its most profound and articulate exponent. ...Schnitzler, Klimpt, Kokoschka, and Schiele also discovered and explored new aspects of our unconscious mental life. They understood women better than Freud... and they saw more clearly than Freud the importance of an infant's bonding to its mother. They even realized the significance of the aggressive instinct earlier than Freud did. ...Plato discussed unconscious knowledge ...pointing out that much of our knowledge is inherent in the psyche in latent form. ...Hermann von Helmholtz... advanced the idea that the unconscious plays a critical role in human visual perception."

"One of the most important ways of understanding the unconscious—indeed, as Freud saw it, the royal road to discovering the nature of its contents—is the dream."

"Freud’s cultural influence [on the West] is based, at least implicitly, on the premise that his theory is scientifically valid. But from a scientific point of view, classical Freudian psychoanalysis is dead as both a theory of the mind and a mode of therapy. No empirical evidence supports any specific proposition of psychoanalytic theory.... This is what Freud believed, and so far as we can tell Freud was wrong in every respect. For example, the unconscious mind revealed in laboratory studies of automaticity and implicit memory bears no resemblance to the unconscious mind of psychoanalytic theory... Freud also changed the vocabulary with which we understand ourselves and others. […] While Freud had an enormous impact on 20th century culture, he has been a dead weight on 20th century psychology . . . At best, Freud is a figure of only historical interest for psychologists. He is better studied as a writer, in departments of [Western] language and literature, than as a scientist, in departments of psychology. Psychologists can get along without him […] Of course, Freud lived at a particular period of time, and it might be argued that his theories were valid when applied to European culture at the turn of the last century, even if they are no longer apropos today. However, recent historical analyses show that Freud’s construal of his case material was systematically distorted and biased by his theories of unconscious conflict and infantile sexuality, and that he misinterpreted and misrepresented the scientific evidence available to him. Freud’s theories were not just a product of his time: they were misleading and incorrect even when he published them."

"Whatever you call it, there is a struggle in the universe between good and evil. Now not only is that struggle structured out somewhere in the external forces of the universe, it's structured in our own lives. Psychologists have tried to grapple with it in their way, and so they say various things. Sigmund Freud used to say that this tension is a tension between what he called the id and the superego. Some of us feel that it's a tension between God and man."

"Freud contended that the clitoral orgasm was adolescent, and that upon puberty, when women began having intercourse with men, women should transfer the center of orgasm to the vagina. The vagina, it was assumed, was able to produce a parallel, but more mature, orgasm than the clitoris. Much work was done to elaborate on this theory, but little was done to challenge the basic assumptions. To fully appreciate this incredible invention, perhaps Freud's general attitude about women should first be recalled. Mary Ellmann, in Thinking About Women, summed it up this way: "Everything in Freud's patronizing and fearful attitude toward women follows from their lack of a penis, but it is only in his essay The Psychology of Women that Freud makes explicit ... the deprecations of women which are implicit in his work. He then prescribes for them the abandonment of the life of the mind, which will interfere with their sexual function. When the psychoanalyzed patient is male, the analyst sets himself the task of developing the man's capacities; but with women patients, the job is to resign them to the limits of their sexuality. As Mr. Rieff puts it: For Freud, "Analysis cannot encourage in women new energies for success and achievement, but only teach them the lesson of rational resignation." It was Freud's feelings about women's secondary and inferior relationship to men that formed the basis for his theories on female sexuality. Once having laid down the law about the nature of our sexuality, Freud not so strangely discovered a tremendous problem of frigidity in women. His recommended cure for a woman who was frigid was psychiatric care. She was suffering from failure to mentally adjust to her "natural" role as a woman."

"Vladimir Nabokov said the two great evils of the 20th century were Marx and Freud. He was absolutely correct. Freud has saturated our culture. People operate on Freudian theory in almost everything they do and they're completely unaware of it. I'm really sensitive to how Freudian theory seized the day, because as a novelist I once wrote characters with complete Freudian backgrounds. The basic assumption of Freud is that none of us is responsible for what we are: What we are is a consequence of what our parents did to us, what our culture did to us, what society did to us, the injustices we've suffered. So, in essence, we're victims. What we do as a society is seek simple answers. Freudianism is a simple answer: If what everybody does is simply a result of what was done to them as a child by their parents, or their culture, then they're not really responsible. All we have to do is put them through a 12-step program and they'll cease being a serial killer or whatever. That's so grossly simplistic. And yet it has dominated the thinking of our century, especially our legal system."

"my father was a Freudian analyst, as well as an anthropologist. He became a lay analyst. Freud said that dreaming is extremely important, and I probably absorbed that. Then I read Jung, and Jung has rather specific theories about dreams. Some of them made sense to me; some of them didn't."

"Every time I see a photograph of Freud I wonder how a man who spent his whole life tête-à-tête with sex can look that gloomy."

"Sigmund Freud… Analyze this! Analyze this! Analyze this-this-this!"

"For Freud the ultimate psychological reality is the system of attractions and tensions which attaches the child to parental images, and then through these to all other persons."

"There is no longer any risk that Freudian research will shock us by recalling what there is of the "barbarian" in us; the risk is rather that the findings will be too easily accepted in an "idealist" form."

"At one time, many philosophers held that faultless "laws of thought" were somehow inherent, a priori, in the very nature of mind. This belief was twice shaken in the past century; first when Russell and his successors showed how the logic men employ can be defective, and later when Freud and Piaget started to reveal the tortuous ways in which our minds actually develop."

"Each child makes "internal models" that help them predict their Imprimers' reactions... as an "internalized" system of values—and this could be how people develop what we call ethics, conscience, or moral sense. Perhaps Sigmund Freud had such a process in mind when he suggested that children can "introject" some of their parents' attitudes."

"Much research in psychology has been more concerned with how large groups of people behave than about the particular ways in which each individual person thinks... too statistical. I find this disappointing because, in my view of the history of psychology, far more was learned, for example, when Jean Piaget spent several years observing the ways that three children developed, or when Sigmund Freud took several years to examine the thinking of a rather small number of patients."

"How much of a person's competence is based on knowing which actions not to take? We usually think of a person's abilities in positive terms... But one could take the opposite view that "An expert is someone who rarely slips up—because of knowing what not to do." However, this subject was rarely discussed in the twentieth-century—except, perhaps most notably, in Sigmund Freud's analysis."

"Sigmund Freud's early view of the mind [is] as a system for dealing with conflicts between our instinctive and acquired ideas."

"Freud is all nonsense; the secret of neurosis is to be found in the family battle of wills to see who can refuse the longest to help with the dishes."

"Whereas Freud was for the most part concerned with the morbid effects of unconscious repression, Jung was more interested in the manifestations of unconscious expression, first in the dream and eventually in all the more orderly products of religion and art and morals."

"... I think he's crude. I think he's medieval. And I don't want an elderly gentleman from Vienna ... with an umbrella ... inflicting his dreams upon me."

"As Dr. Sigmund Freud has observed, it can not even be said that the State has ever shown any disposition to suppress crime, but only to safeguard its own monopoly of crime."

"When Freud comments on the shocking disparity between State-ethics and private ethics – and his observations on this point are most profound and searching – the historical method at once supplies the best of reasons why that disparity should be looked for."

"J. Robert Oppenheimer: [[wikipedia:Ernest_Lawrence|[Ernest] Lawrence]], you embrace the revolution in physics, can’t you see it everywhere else? Picasso, Stravinsky, Freud, Marx..."

"American feminism’s nose dive began when Kate Millet, that imploding beanbag of poisonous self-pity, declared Freud a sexist. Trying to build a sex theory without studying Freud, women have made nothing but mud pies."

"The two deepest thinkers on sex in the twentieth century are Sigmund Freud and D.H. Lawrence. Their reputations as radical liberators were so universally acknowledged that brooding images of Freud and Lawrence in poster form adorned the walls of students in the Sixties."

"Doctor Freud not only used cocaine himself, but he also prescribed it to his patients. And then he drew his generalizations. Cocaine is a strong sexual arouser. That's why everything Freud invented — all those oedipuses, sphinxes and sphincters — is relevant only to a mental dimension of a patient, whose brain is turned to fried-eggs by cocaine. In such a state, one really has only one problem left — what to do first, to screw his mother or to do away with his father. Of course, until his cocaine runs out. And in those times, there were no problems with supplies. But so long as your daily dose is less than three grams, you don't have to fear either the Oedipus complex, nor other things discovered by Freud."

"Freud was, after all, a genius. You can tell that because people still hate him."

"Babies are … obviously narcissistic, but not in the way adults are, not even Spinoza's God, and I am a little afraid that Freud sometimes forgets that the narcissistic baby has no sense of self."

"Yes, you hate me. But didn't I try to atone? If I'd been a real Nazi I'd have chosen Jung, nicht wahr? But I chose Freud instead, the Jew. Freud's vision of the world had no Buchenwalds in it. Buchenwald, according to Freud, once the light was let in, would become a soccer field, fat children would learn flower arranging and solfeggio in the strangling rooms."

"Perhaps the last cultural fad one could still argue against was Karl Marx. But Freud — or Rawls? To argue against such persons is to grant them a premise they spend all of their effort disproving: that reason is involved in their theories."

"Freud … agreed in principle to the importance of sexual health. But he did not want what sexual health entailed, the attack on certain institutions which opposed it."

"Analytic therapy is thus a form of re-education; Freud specifically called it that. It is re-education so far as it eliminates those symptoms through which the patient has tried, mistakenly, to resolve the contradictions in his life."

"What hope there is derives from Freud’s assumption that human nature is not so much a hierarchy of high-low, and good-bad, as his predecessors believed, but rather a jostling democracy of contending predispositions, deposited in every nature in roughly equal intensities. … Psychoanalysis is full of such mad logic; it is convincing only if the student of his own life accepts Freud’s egalitarian revision of the traditional idea of a hierarchical human nature."

"I think he, Christ and Marx are responsible for the world being the way it is—and I confer my thanks upon all of them, as I withhold it."

"Man is essentially a dreamer, wakened sometimes for a moment by some peculiarly obtrusive element in the outer world, but lapsing again quickly into the happy somnolence of imagination. Freud has shown how largely our dreams at night are the pictured fulfilment of our wishes; he has, with an equal measure of truth, said the same of day-dreams; and he might have included the day-dreams which we call beliefs."

"When I came to read Freud himself, I was amazed to discover how sensible his writings are and how much milder than what passes for Freudianism among the pseudo-intelligent."

"We all grow up in a land of giants when we are very small... within us, surely, is some part of our childhood that hasn't disappeared and hasn't grown up. ...In your formative years, you learn from direct experience, absolutely incontrovertible, that there are much larger, much wiser, and much more powerful creatures in the universe than you. And your strongest emotional bonds are to them. ...and you must propitiate them. ...Isn't it... likely that there remains a part of us that is still in the practice of this...? Could that have something to do with prayer specifically and with religious beliefs in general? Well, this is in fact the scandalous view of Sigmund Freud in Totem and Taboo and The Future of an Illusion and other famous books of the first few decades of the twentieth century."

"Freud's view was that "at bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father."... The view here is that we start out with a sense that our parents are omnipotent and omniscient... There's a part of us that has been inducted into a dominance hierarchy and doesn't like the uncertainty of having to deal with things for ourselves. ...one of the many reasons that are given for the advantages of military life and other powerfully hierarchical societies is that it's not required to think for oneself very much. There's something calming about that. ...according to Freud, we then foist upon the cosmos our own emotional predispositions."

"It is now clear that Freud was correct in positing the unconscious mind develops before the conscious and that the early development of the unconscious is equivalent to the genesis of a self-system that operates beneath conscious verbal levels for the rest of the life span."

"Freud seems most accurate when describing people most like the nineteenth-century European bourgeoisie he lived among"

"The two most original and creative figures in modern psychiatry, Freud and Jung were both proscribed by the Nazis … for both, though holding widely divergent views, upheld the value of the individual personality."

"as Freud's views on the childhood source of mental disorder have permeated our culture, there has been mounted a wide campaign of mother-suspicion and mother-discreditation. From Sidney Howard's play The Silver Cord, in the mid-twenties, to Philip Roth's more recent Portnoy's Complaint, our literature has disseminated the idea that American women alternate a diet of husbands with a diet of sons."

"Freud … showed us that poetry is indigenous to the very constitution of the mind; he saw the mind as being, in the greater part of its tendency, exactly a poetry-making faculty."

"Probably no theory evolved by man is as absurd as Sigmund Freud's theory of penis envy. To a woman, the penis and scrotum seem superfluous to man's otherwise neatly constructed body. They are almost untidy. She cannot understand that after use the penis is not retractable like an aerial on a portable radio. And as for envy — it would never occur, even to a little girl. Not in her deepest unconscious would she wish to possess a penis; and as to being at a disadvantage compared to a little boy, that is nonsense, for she gets preferential treatment anyway. Freud was merely the victim of training by woman's self-abasement techniques — thanks to his mother, wife, and probably his daughters as well. He confused cause and effect; a woman only says she is worth less than a man. She doesn't really think it. If anyone ought to feel a sense of envy, it is men. They should be jealous of women's power. But, of course, they never are, for they glory in their powerlessness."

"Many aspects of Freudian theory are indeed out of date, and they should be: Freud died in 1939, and he has been slow to undertake further revisions. His critics, however, are equally behind the times, attacking Freudian views of the 1920s as if they continue to have some currency in their original form."

"The scientific debate on reports and recollections of child sexual abuse goes back to at least 1896, when Freud argued that repression of early childhood seduction (sexual molestation) had etiological significance for adult hysteria […]. He later recanted, saying that he was wrong about the repression of actual experiences of child sexual abuse and that it was fantasies (of sexual contact with parents or other adults) that drove the hysteria [..]. The research [in peer-reviewed publications in the 1980s and ‘90s] revisited the issue of repression of child sexual abuse and suggest that a large proportion of women sexually abused in childhood have no recall of the abuse. These studies support Freud's originally hypothesized connection between child sexual abuse, no recall of the abuse, and high levels of psychological symptoms in adulthood, at least in clinical samples."

"Freud is constantly claiming to be scientific. But what he gives is speculation — something prior even to the formation of an hypothesis."

"Wisdom is something I would never expect from Freud. Cleverness, certainly; but not wisdom."

"Freud … has not given an explanation of the ancient myth. What he has done is to propound a new myth."

"Freud is an interesting case in the history of psychology. To many he is the embodiment of cultural relativism, with the great emphasis he placed on the role of the parents and family in the shaping of an individual’s personality. However, Freud deserves mention for two reasons. First, unlike many subsequent psychologists Freud was interested in ultimate questions; he was preoccupied by finding out why people behaved as they did, not simply how. Second, although many of these accounts were distinctly non-Darwinian (e.g. the Oedipus complex in which a male child desires to kill his father), some of his ideas are much more in line with recent Darwinian psychology."

"Freud very rightly brought his critical faculties to bear upon the dream. It is, in fact, inadmissible that this considerable portion of psychic activity (since, at least from man’s birth until his death, thought offers no solution of continuity, the sum of the moments of the dream, from the point of view of time, and taking into consideration only the time of pure dreaming, that is the dreams of sleep, is not inferior to the sum of the moments of reality, or, to be more precisely limiting, the moments of waking) has still today been so grossly neglected."

"To truly know the world, look deeply within your own being; to truly know yourself, take real interest in the world."

"Live through deeds of love, and let others live understanding their unique intentions: this is the fundamental principle of free human beings."

"The fundamental maxim of free men is to live in love towards our actions, and to let live in the understanding of the other person's will."

"Ethical individualism... is spiritualized theory of evolution carried over into moral life."

"Only to the extent that a man has emancipated himself...from all that is generic, does he count as a free spirit within a human community. No man is all genus, none is all individuality."

"Truth is a free creation of the human spirit, that never would exist at all if we did not generate it ourselves. The task of understanding is not to replicate in conceptual form something that already exists, but rather to create a wholly new realm, that together with the world given to our senses constitutes the fullness of reality."

"Each individual is a species unto him/herself."

"Anthroposophy is a path of knowledge, to guide the spiritual in the human being to the spiritual in the universe... Anthroposophists are those who experience, as an essential need of life, certain questions on the nature of the human being and the universe, just as one experiences hunger and thirst."

"Goethe's thinking was mobile. It followed the whole growth process of the plant and followed how one plant form is a modification of the other. Goethe's thinking was not rigid with inflexible contours; it was a thinking in which the concepts continually metamorphose. Thereby his concepts became, if I may put it this way, intimately adapted to the process that plant nature itself goes through."

"You have no idea how unimportant is all that the teacher says or does not say on the surface, and how important what he himself is as teacher."

"We shall not set up demands nor programmes, but simply describe the child-nature. (...) Vague and general phrases — ‘the harmonious development of all the powers and talents in the child,’ and so forth — cannot provide the basis for a genuine art of education. Such an art of education can only be built up on a real knowledge of the human being. Not that these phrases are incorrect, but that at bottom they are as useless as it would be to say of a machine that all its parts must be brought harmoniously into action. To work a machine you must approach it, not with phrases and truisms, but with real and detailed knowledge."

"Those who judge human beings according to generic characteristics only reach the boundary, beyond which people begin to be beings whose activity is based on free self-determination....Characteristics of race, tribe, ethnic group and gender are subjects for special sciences....But all these sciences cannot penetrate through to the special nature of the individual. Where the realm of freedom of thought and action begin, the determination of individuals according to generic laws ends."

"Because of their very nature, science and logical thinking can never decide what is possible or impossible. Their only function is to explain what has been ascertained by experience and observation."

"The aim of the Ahrimanic powers is to prevent...development... to harden and freeze up the earth, to shape it in such a way that, together with the earth, man remains an earthbound creature. He becomes hardened... and continues to live in the future ages of the world as a kind of statue of his past... The earth could not reach its goal if the Ahrimanic powers were to gain the victory, if man were alienated from his beginnings, from the powers who supported him at the beginning of his evolution. Outwardly, the human being would develop in a way entirely in keeping with the earthly sphere, but by suppressing his innate disposition, which must lead him beyond the earth. The Ahrimanic powers could not touch man while the intellect was still rooted in the spiritual through an old inheritance, as was the case during the past three or four centuries. But this has changed since the beginning of the 20th century. The ancient Indian wisdom knew this, and fixed the end of the 19th century as the end of the “Dark Age,” of Kali-Yuga. Thus it had an intimation of a new age. This new age was to indicate that from the beginning of the 20th century, our deepest concern should no longer be that of clinging to an old spiritual inheritance, but of absorbing the new light, the pure light, in our earthly life."

"In this world-historic moment it is as though we could behold the deeds of those who lived upon earth before the end of Kali-Yuga, in the 1880's and 90's. That which was then enacted among men on earth, has now been received by Thrones, Cherubim and Seraphim. Yet never was the spiritual contrast-of-light so great as it is to-day, in the realm of these spiritual facts. In the 1880's one could look upward and see how the people of the Revolutionary period of the middle of the 19th century, were received as to their deeds by Thrones and Cherubim and Seraphim. But as one looked, a kind of darkling cloud settled over the middle of the 19th century. What one then saw passing into the realm of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, lighted up only a very little."

"In the second part of Faust, Goethe puts the following words into the mouth of a seeress: “Him I love who craves the impossible,” and Goethe himself, in his “Prose Proverbs,” says: “To live in the idea means treating the impossible as though 't were possible.”"

"Everything which the ego is able to unfold within itself must give birth to love. The all-embracing archetype of love is set forth in the revelation of... the Christ Mystery. Through Him the germ of love is planted in the innermost core of the human being; and from this starting-point it must flow through the whole of evolution. Just as the wisdom previously formed manifests in the forces of the earthly sense-world, in the “elementary forces” of to-day, so love itself will manifest in the future, in all phenomena, as the new “elementary force.”"

"The secret of all future development is a recognition that everything achieved by man from a right comprehension of evolution is a sowing of seed which must ripen into love. And the greater the amount of love-force, so much the greater will be the creative force available for the future. In that which will grow from love, will lie the mighty forces leading to that culminating point of spiritualization described above. The greater the amount of spiritual knowledge that flows into human and terrestrial evolution, so much more living and fruitful seed will be stored up for the future. Spiritual knowledge is transmuted through its own nature into love... The wisdom of the outer world becomes inner wisdom in man from the Earth period onward and when it is concentrated in him, it becomes the germ of love. Wisdom is the necessary preliminary condition for love; love is the fruit of wisdom, reborn in the ego."

"1919...Henri Bergson, Karl Barth, Ernst Cassirer, Havelock Ellis, Karl Jaspers, John Maynard Keynes, Rudolf Steiner—indelible figures—were all active in their various spheres."

"One of us, I no longer remember which one, began to speak of the spiritual decline of culture as the fundamental, unremarked problem of our times. We realized that both of us were occupied with this question; neither had expected this of the other. A lively discussion ensued. Each of us experienced from one another that we had taken on the same mission in life: to strive for the rise of true culture enlivened and formed by humane ideals, and to stimulate people to become truly thoughtful human beings. We took leave of one another in this consciousness of solidarity....We each followed one another's work. To take part in Rudolf Steiner's high flight of thought of spiritual science was not given to me. I know, however, that in this he lifted up and renewed many people, and his disciples attained exceptional accomplishments in many realms. I have rejoiced at the achievement which his great personality and his profound humanity have brought about in the world."

"Steiner's incredible industry was self defeating. The mountain of titles, the avalanche of ideas, obscures the clarity and simplicity of his basic insight. Nevertheless, for the reader who declines to be discouraged, the rewards can be enormous. Once the basic insight has been grasped, we can begin to understand the source of those tremendous mental energies, and the sheer breadth of Steiner's vision. It hardly matters that there is a great deal that we may find unacceptable, or even repellent. What is so absorbing is to be in contact with a mind that was capable of this astonishing range of inner experience. Steiner was a man who had discovered an important secret; his books are fascinating because they contain continual glimpses of this secret. We may read them critically, wondering where Steiner was 'amplifying' genuine intuitions, and where he was amplifying his own dreams and imaginings. We may even conclude that Swedenborg, Blake, and Madame Blavatsky had all developed the same power of amplification, and that Steiner's visions of angelic hierarchies are no truer than Swedenborg's visions of heaven and hell, Blake's visions of the daughters of Albion, or Madame Blavatsky's visions of the giants of Atlantis. But all that is beside the point. The real point is that this faculty of amplification is our human birthright, and that anyone who can grasp this can learn to pass through that door to the inner universe as easily as he could stroll through the entrance of the British Museum."

"His life, consecrated wholly to the sacrificial service of humanity, was requited with unspeakable hostility; his way of knowledge was transformed into a path of thorns. But he walked the whole way, and mastered it for all humanity. He broke through the limits of knowledge; they are no longer there. (...) In this he achieved the greatest human deed. The greatest deed of the Gods he taught us to understand; the greatest human deed he achieved. How could he escape being hated with all the demonic power of which Hell is capable? (...) He did what once Prometheus expiated, What gave to Socrates the poisoned cup – The pardoning of Barabbas was less vile – A deed whose expiation is the cross. He made the future live before you there. We demons cannot suffer such a thing. (...) He dared – and, daring, he endured his fate – in love, long suffering, and tolerance, of weak, incapable humanity, which ever all his work in peril set. (...)"

"There's no redder rag for our modern, progressive Catholics than a certain religious approach to sex and Eros ranging from suspicion to open condemnation and branded accordingly as Manichean, neo-Platonic, Puritan, etc. Quite unacceptable. And yet in these quite obviously heretical speculations there's a barb which, even at first encounter, penetrated to the depths of my mind as the startling confirmation of something always known, and this ferment keeps on working - all the time...the idea which one finds in so many apocryphal trends of thought, i.e. that there's definitely something wrong with sex in its present form, that is, during this terrestrial aeon - something that is not sex in itself, as a whole, but some trait or quality.. Something which does not belong to original human nature, but which owes its actual existence to The Fall; in the same sense unnatural as death is unnatural and yet taken for granted, an inevitable, undeniable factor - in this fallen world."

"genuine continence and virginity are rare and costly achievements - admirable and really extraordinary; the real thing , nota bene, not simply a shrivelling of Eros-power by means of life-long taboo injections. The Ancients knew this - they called chastity, honestly, simply and humbly, a gift, a charisma, to be implored from God with tears and in humiliating experience - not just a simple athletic feat of will-power and self-control."

"Once again the tide of Carmelite spitrituality is drawing me, like a current, and, yet again, I sense its dangerous challenge to my own appointed way. Utter nakedness, utter rejection, utter renunciation - how tempting is this stream of spirituality, with the tremendous nimbus of its glorious and venerable past!"

"The close affinity between sexual Eros and deceit is very startling - as in infatuation, infidelity and jealousy: " Quoniam lumbi mei repleti sunt illusionibus. " For, isolated, Eros is in every sense the most treacherous counterfeit of love, sending a continual flow of self-deception and delusion throughout the world, etc."

"I've just finished reading Shakespeare's Sonnets, that is, I've read and understood them for the first time. One passionate, desolate lament - immeasurable and inconsolable - for the waning, wasting and passing of beauty. At the same time there's something disturbingly un-Christian here - the utterly heathen, desperate keening of the dirges, the grisly dances of death, danses macabres, in which death is nothing but the end, finality - destruction, not transition."

"That wild Irish novel (Blackcock's Feather, Maurice Walsh), a wonderful Elizabethan cloak and dagger story, has started me spinning again, those same old threads; the link between begetting and killing, i.e. that sex and death must both be phenomena of fallen Creation...Another odd parallel; the very men who haven't the courage to beget children, to accept fatherhood, are likely to be pacifists on principle, and opponents of the death penalty. What was it that old Afghan, Mahbud Ali, said to Kim: "When I was fifteen I had shot my man and begot my man!"..as representative of God and Christ glorified, consecrated to him, he [the priest] is absolved from these characteristics of fallen humanity, dispensed, raised above them - neither for ascetic reasons, nor on human grounds, but simply because these are the symbols of the Adamite order."

"Isn't the very fact that convents exist dazzling evidence enough of the presence of the Spirit, unsatisfactory and odd as their inmates often are?"

"Goethe, whose letters I've been reading very intensively during the past few weeks, is always stressing Verträglichkeit - agreeing to live and let live - as the most important element of friendship: we shouldn't try to change people, but simply let them be as they are, making the best of even partial concord, instead of trying to force a fictitious perfect harmony."

"Even read in such broken bits Origen is real food and drink. You can feel it being absorbed, right away, into your very blood. How terse, how compact he is! All this modern stuff is barley-water in comparison."

"one's twentieth birthday. That day opened the door to a wider life: I reached out to grasp reality. But in fact it was reality which gripped me with its restrictions and constraints and rules which arrogantly claim to be the laws of life, of the universe. To be grown-up really meant resignation; one gave in (if ruefully), laughing a little at one's young dreams."

"We're always being told that the Fall had nothing whatever to do with sex. No, I can't believe this any more...Not that procreation, as such, would never have been without the Fall. That's nonsense, to my mind; but somehow or other it would have been different...If it's true that St Thomas held other and more optimistic views on this subject, this doesn't disconcert me one bit. Maybe an angel-type, as he was, endowed with the charism of virginity, would be incapable of realizing the depth of the Fall in this domain. What is always attributed to the latent Manicheism in St Augustine might well be the realism of experience."

"Francis de Sales defines jealousy as the expression of a violent but impure love. Does he know how it can be purified, I wonder? Or must it die slowly- in its own festering sore, as it were - burning, oozing out, the way a wound cleanses itself before it heals?"

"The German Youth Movement started quite inconspicuously: a band of secondary schoolboys in Berlin, bored to death by their homes and schools and grown-ups in general, sought to elude this adult world by spending their Sundays and holidays roaming the countryside - what we call hiking, an unheard of pursuit in those days...Hiking became symbolic, standing for Back to Nature against modern civilization; the free-lance spirit as against gregariousness, yet, paradoxically, the urge for comradeship against atomizing individualism...In 1933 the Nazis swallowed up the groups on the nationalistic fringe and shattered the bulk of the Bünde as bulwarks of the individualistic and independent spirit...Today, I suppose, for many of its former members the Youth Movement represents no more than a store of youthful memories. But a small but by no means negligible minority did receive a basic shaping and moulding which held good for the rest of their lives, the essence of that fleeting spirit of the Movement: a shared vision of the true nature of man and his place in the universe,...; a special kind of awareness to Nature; an extremely keen sense of intellectual and spiritual responsibility and a peculiar sanity and sobriety of judgment. This is quite a lot to be thankful for."

"I've come to the end of von Hügel's voluminous work on Catherine of Genoa. For such outlay in erudition, it's basically an unrewarding book (for me!), but full of interesting side-lights...Curious, for instance, that Catherine, always universally cited as the recognised authority, the most important and competent witness to the nature of Purgatory, should actually never have had a vision of it - neither as shewing nor as visiting in spirit, as other mystics did..Her statements are pure conclusions, analogies, based on her own spiritual experiences of suffering and bliss: "So that's what it must be like in Purgatory!""

"people run away from burdens these days. There's nothing they hate more than to be burdened or tied. This accounts for this perverse cult of youthfulness: youth is in itself the yet unburdened state - so we worship youthful looks as the sign and symbol of that craving, almost the promise of its fulfilment. But to attempt to keep it for ever only leads to sterility in every sense: monstrous perversion of youth, destined as blossom of the fruit..."

"The sins of our educational system (Catholic): How we ourselves were wronged by it and how we wronged others in its name. What people call moral training is really a political activity - representing a particular community and its vested interests, which is why it is so liable to political sins and blunders."

"Actually we were brought up to ingratitude - a relentless training through which we were taught to find nothing whatever good in ourselves, whether natural or spiritual..Conquering pride and conceit, they called it, practising humility, self-praise is no praise - all very well...Was pride really crushed by all this snubbing and humiliation? Was it not rather repressed...Worse still, we learnt this way to cultivate the devil's mirror eye of Hans Andersen's Snow Queen , over-vigilant, super-critical sight, sharpened to discover the worm in every bud, even the tiniest plant-louse! For if one practises this sort of discipline on oneself, day and night, it is asking too much - at any rate of a young girl - to judge one's neighbour by another yard-stick. All the time one's lynx-eyed consciousness remained on the alert, quick to pounce on everything negative - in you and in myself...Hans Andersen well knew how near this attitude is to blasphemy."

"Psalm 118 - my solace and my blessing - unfathomably deep. It is my backbone."

""From time to time I have the feeling that certain instincts [urges? involuntary impulses?] are being annihilated within me, which have hitherto seemed good and perfect: yet as soon as they are destroyed I perceive how evil and imperfect they were." (Catherine of Genoa). This strikes me as very important, for it shows that the judgment of conscience can change, and precisely in someone whose conscience must already have been particularly highly developed, sensitive and illuminated."

"Larion's Law by Peter Freuchen. An Indian saga written by a Dane who lived for thirty years among the woodland tribes of Alaska and even had an Eskimo wife...Really one is ashamed to belong to a white race...what we did to Indians, Negroes, Australian aborigines (not even out of political fanaticism either, but as a matter of course, en passant)"

"Humanly speaking the Church as a whole will never cut a good figure, and her exceptions seem almost like another species."

"the Legion of little Souls does exist, and they did become manifest in the Little Flower. True, they get on our nerves more than they edify us - precisely that awful Martin family with their pompous self-preoccupation, their insufferable family worship, a perpetual mutual admiration society - but, say what you will, such people really do have religion, in the strictest sense of the word - living contact, authentic conversation with God. They do live out of their trust in him, are honestly concerned with seeking and doing his will, they take pains about being kind to their neighbours, for his sake. Is this really not enough? To hell with all esoterics!"

"Been reading Hardy's Return of the Native. Astonishing how moral standards have shifted over the past hundred years:shifted isn't the word - a landslide...Today the problems of these nineteenth-century novels strike us as exaggerated, as bathos, even comical - much ado about nothing. But for these people it really was a struggle with the gods, very real, menacing, dangerous gods."

"All the time each one of us is hovering above an unfathomable abyss of potential calamities of every kind - sensed in that ever-throbbing pulse deep down in one's heart; as long as this chasm does not open up to devour one, the floating island in any guise whatever must surely be welcome. Wrong notion of God? Asiatic pessimism?"

"That Somerset Maugham anthology Cakes and Ale. How destructive he is, venomous, pulling everything down in biting, corrosive cynicism. Yet somewhere deep down under all the conceit, sarcasm and snobbery is real quivering pain, helpless bewilderment at the inexplicable fact that human nature is chequered. And what perplexes him is less the common, mean element in decent people than the goodness and kindness of wicked, vicious ones."

"I'm reading George Borrow's Lavengro...and , of course, it fits perfectly into the pattern of my current reading! - Fallada and Arnold Bennett's The Old Wives Tale, i.e. my constant musings on the nineteenth century. I was amazed to learn from Bennett's book that in Papa's childhood you could watch an execution, which was a public entertainment, a real show, with high prices paid for windows with a good view, and the local hotels doing a roaring trade."

"Reading lots of Dickens. Barnaby Rudge: the last Catholic pogrom - No Popery, the Gordon Riots in London - 1780, twenty years before Newman was born. He must have known people who had set fire to the houses, or taken in victims and refugees. Lord George Gordon who led the mob (obviously a religious maniac) died as late as 1793. Old Curiosity Shop, Nicholas Nickleby - this too, is part of Newman's background, this gallery of living gargoyles, ghouls and monsters. Might account, perhaps, even for some of Newman's pessimism about the world and human nature, which some attribute merely to his own melancholy disposition? That nineteenth century!!"

"Reading O'Rahilly's life of Father William Doyle. I'm surprised this book hasn't left a deeper mark, for it contains - often in parallel terms - the whole teaching of the Little Way which created such a stir in the case of Thérèse. But it seems people prefer to accept such things from a lovely young girl complete with smile, roses and veil. One can't help wondering whether Thérèse would have met with the same enormous response had she been hopelessly ugly - a hunchback with a squint, or old..."

"Legenda Aurea. To think that there's no Catholic edition of this most Catholic book!...Richard Benz sees it as epic and myth of the Middle Ages, exact parallel to the Gothic cathedrals. Sunk into oblivion with the epoch, rediscovered through the history of art, in the countless painters inspired by the Legend. Wonderful, costly and beautiful - but belonging utterly to the past, monument, museum: venerable, interesting , imposing - tout à fait passé."

"Life of Paul of the Cross, founder of the Passionists. Astonishing really that he should be so little known, should have left so little impression..Strangely thrilling that St Paul - end of the eighteenth century! - should have prayed all his life for the conversion of England, pledging his sons to do likewise. Once, during Mass, he had a vision of my sons in England. But only in 1841, almost seventy years after his death, did they actually set foot on English soil - through Fr Dominic Barberi. It was he who received Newman into the Church.."

"Wealth is a virtue which has to be practised, really learnt, if it is to be of any real use to its owner, turned to good account, giving him confidence, freedom, power and independence - not enervating him, making him dependent, stingy, soft and vain."

"What does really happen when the factor of love withdraws from a human relationship? Is it a loss or a gain? Is the real landscape revealed at last, hitherto transfigured, but delusive, too, by the driving mist of fantasy? Is it a perverted vision which finds a glowing cloud more beautiful than the solid truth of a plot of earth? And vice versa, what really happens when the radiance, the glamour, begins to take shape, concentrating on a landscape or on a face?"

"I'm reading Günther Anders' Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (The Antiquity of Man)..That bit about Promethean shame impressed me..observations about the shame of being oneself, the reluctance at stepping out of line, of being forward, of being looked at. This is entirely true to life...Yet it's just as natural to man to want to be seen, to want to be outstanding, to be regarded, as to want to hide - and both these instincts - for that's what they are - clash, often with equal force...How clearly I see the Little Flower in this light: from earliest days the focal point for her whole family, yet on the other hand sincerely desiring to be hidden, taking the veil - and so wonderfully unveiled to posterity, revealed to the world, set up as an image, i.e. to be looked at!"

"isn't every kind of conformity really a sort of masquerade, the mask at once conspicuous and disguising?"

"Yet again - visible and invisible. The panic of loneliness - not physical, far more moral - arises from the fact that every lonely person is wearing a tarnkappe , a magic hood, (in German fairy tales, a magic cap which makes the wearer invisible) against his will: which is tantamount to saying: "If people don't bother about me, it's because nobody is seeing me - seeing me. I'm just a piece of furniture in their eyes." … Newcomers in a strange world suffer this fate especially, what's more in a doubly unpleasant way: first because no one takes any notice of them since they don't belong, i.e. they're nobodies, yet at the same time they're conspicuous, in the way, a nuisance, desperately conscious of being just awkward lumps of furniture."

"In the Napoleonic Museum in Arenenberg I was rather impressed just how richly clad in the costume of Antiquity the First Empire in fact was - dressed up even comically with its laurels and eagles and togas. Return to Rome wherever you look, though of course not to the Holy Roman Empire - to Caesar's Rome. But the French Revolution itself had fallen back on more or less genuine or imaginary classical models: Brutus and Tiberius Gracchus and Gaius Gracchus, the Gracchi, consuls and Roman virtues - even these revolutionaries couldn't resolve to start from scratch with something really new."

"St Thomas had lots to say about the mystical quality of createdness. For him the creature is truly a mystery, a mystical reality. Sometimes this strikes me so forcibly that I shrink from crushing a gnat or plucking a blade of grass - how dare one do such a thing, except of necessity? Nothing sentimental about this - not even compassion at having to hurt things - simply awe before their Maker. I'd never dare to tear up someone else's sketch or manuscript without first asking the author's permission - unless, of course, he had asked me to do so."

"Trochu's Vianney book makes me shudder. Positively frightening - and the saint too. The first time I read it I was quite horrified...Actually he is a second Simeon Stylites - and how hard and stern he is - and not only against himself: he would excommunicate his parishioners if they even once went dancing or drinking - like the most rigorous Puritan..For him sin involved personal, direct single combat with Satan...But there's no glove to Vianney's peasant fist. He's really gruesome."

"I'm afraid I do believe that all earthly love can die - since man is mortal, why not also his most human feature? - and for me pretensions such as love that dies was never love, etc. belong to schoolgirls' albums."

"In private one can well be a cat that walks by itself, and without roots in any specific soil: but in the great battle for the Kingdom of God it seems to me one ought to belong to some brotherhood."

"I'm reading Kristin Lavransdatter again - it's one of the greatest poetic books, and the most powerful portrayal of medieval Christendom I know....I must admit that it makes me cry every time - because it's so real, so true , reaching to the depths of human nature, touching one to the quick."

"Léon Bloy, despite his many impressive qualities..what a hater he was! - wild and implacable, and what power of abuse! Strange don't you think that Ernst Jünger should comment at length in his war-diaries how irresistibly Bloy reminded him of Hitler in his paroxysms of rage and his foul and ribald tongue?..Yet Bloy was undoubtedly a man with great gifts of vision and perception, and charity, too - even in the midst of his orgies of hatred. And much of what he writes about Our Lady of La Salette in his La Salette book is very fine and often goes straight to one's heart..."

"another article by Karl Rahner in Geist und Leben - What he reveals is an issue of the utmost importance: how essential it is for the Christian to recognize a plural, numinous universe, made up of angels, saints, the dead and demons - which are not the same as God...that if this created numinous plurality ceases to be understood as a reality, the very concept of God will be disfigured and distorted..to deny all such powers and figures is just as false, just as ominous as to succomb to them."

"the posthumous visibility of the saints is a puzzling phenomenon indeed, and varies enormously. Little Thérèse emerged from complete obscurity to world-wide publicity; but Vincent Ferrer, for instance, one of the most prominent, most spectacular and dramatic saints in the whole history of the Church seems barely to have outlived his own lifetime. Today he's as good as forgotten."

"For his Spiritual Church Joachim of Fiore foresaw the continuance of the Papacy (much modified), but the bishops were to disappear. If I think at all of the Church to come, then I hope and pray above all for a revival, indeed resurrection of the episcopal office. To my mind it is still a prisoner of its almost thousand-year long disastrous fusion with temporal power. Strange - only a few years ago I thought the Emperor Otto I just marvellous and was full of admiration for his genius in raising the bishops to Reichsfürsten - princes of the realm - thus securing an unshakeable foundation for his Empire. Politically it was a brilliant decision...Yet I can imagine no way in which a mortal enemy of the Church in all craft and cunning could have fastened a worse fate upon her...For how often was their charismatic office as pastors overshadowed, indeed frequently rendered impossible, by their temporal mission and worldly achievements.."

"I've just finished a (for me) very important book about the parents (Louis Martin and Zélie Martin) of the Little Flower..It confirms my thesis 100 per cent: that everything claimed by her super-heralds as her direct inspiration, her unique originality, in fact stemmed from inheritance, upbringing and repetition...Most interesting for me is the recognition how alien and remote this bourgeois piety of the late nineteenth century has become, even for cultivated contemporary Catholic writers - a veritable terra incognita; otherwise this so wide-spread legend of Thérèse's uniqueness could never have grown up."

"I just revelled in that High Mass at Beuron Abbey on All Saints' Day..Of course it's a spectacle, but that's just what makes sense, the very same sense as monasticism in general...ritual as the reflection of glory. How marvellously impersonal it is - the strict anonymity of the monks, even more impressive when they raise their hoods. They are just figures and voices. What an achievement to divest oneself of everything private, individual, to enact this holy drama day after day, indifferent to one's personal mood, representing all of us simply as mouth of the Church."

"Take my own case: from nursery days we were taught to believe the worst of people...We were drilled, in principle and emphatically, never to believe anyone, never to trust anyone, all people are liars, people are always hypocrites, especially if they are nice to you, everyone can be bought, etc..Scandal was the sole topic of conversation in Stockau: 'Just to show you what the world is really like.'...I was fiercely determined to have no illusions, to confront even the ugliest reality face to face. I would smuggle The History of Prostitution and such-like books out of the library, disclosures of financial scandals I couldn't understand, books on the crimes of colonial government...And what was the result? I believed every word people told me, they could lie and swindle and make up whatever they liked...Could it be that my insatiable and often so incautious hunger for people who are good, pure, beautiful and holy is in fact the direct result of that early training to despise people?"

"I'm reading a very quaint American book, The Power of Positive Thinking , written, I'd suppose, by a sectarian minister, presumably of Methodist dye. (Norman Vincent Peale)..He's full of stories of prayers heard - and extols the power of prayer.."Before leaving for an important business conference I brace myself with texts like 'If God be for us, who can be against us?'...Then I stalk into the conference room, sure of my victory, and carry off the most marvellous deal.." This, in essence is the burden of the whole book. That's what people call Christian optimism. But it's wasted on us - we've been spoilt for this sort of thing...But isn't it rather self suggestion than authentic religious impulse? It doesn't seem to have dawned on him that suffering, disappointment, defeat or loss might also have some point too, or that God's designs could sometimes be hidden..."

"I'm reading a biography of St John Baptist de la Salle - Extraordinary what educational insights and experiments have existed already - and what has been forgotten!. That reformatory, for instance, which he founded on the most amazing principles somewhere around 1680...The young delinquents were detained in solitary confinement to begin with, being promoted later..to community life..But in their single cells they were given flowers and plants to cultivate and singing birds to breed! The prisoners took their meals together with the Brothers, and each of the boys in solitary confinement was entrusted to one particular Brother...The Jansenists were bitter opponents of the Brothers, for in all his schools de la Salle laid great stress on frequent Communion..They did their best to oppose him personally and to hinder his work. The French Revolution wrecked his Institute, some of the Brothers were executed, others emigrated."

"the protective, healing silence of forgiveness is just as much part of confession as its quality of judgment - stressed so much more. For in confession sin is not so much subjected to the light of the word, of judicial sentence, as received into the darkness of merciful, secret acceptance, sunk into divine oblivion."

"A happy childhood means - or ought to mean - that one's first experience of the world is a true experience - not yet comprehensive, of course, yet comprehending the prime reality, so that it becomes an experience of an essential order which thenceforward will serve as a basis of comparison, in whose light all future falsification, all disorder, will be recognised as wrong and invalid. A happy childhood means above all a loved child. Because Thérèse was a happy child, her beginnings could contain perfection. Because she was a loved child, she received from the beginning the knowledge that others must struggle towards so consciously, with such difficulty, by painfully strenuous detours: the simple truth that to so many of us seems the most incredible and amazing lesson of religion: that we can be loved without having deserved it: that grace comes first..It is bliss simply to be someone's child, a child of a father, of a mother, living, moving and having its being in a love which is unmerited, unmeritable , anticipatory, unconditional and immutable. On this basic mystery and reality Thérèse's childhood was built. This was the source of her subsequent doctrine of the way of spiritual childhood."

"Anyone who really carries out this existence [ of the Discalced Carmelites ] in spirit and letter must see it as a foretaste of death, of the radical and irrevocable parting from all things that make life rich, sweet and attractive. It is a venturing into death in the hope of receiving a new, mysterious life from the hand of the Lord."

"It′s always seemed odd to me that people don′t paint with both hands. I mean, if I′m technically so shackled that I can′t paint with my hair, stomach or bottom, what about my other hand? You′ve got to live in painting. All-round painting... Indefinable space-at least indefinable in traditional terms-that′s what I require of my paintings. There must be absolutely no central focus... There can be no progress until that damned centre has been eliminated... My paintings are sublimated stamping,screaming and hissing-I try to translate a process experienced physically into a physically visible one."

"I covered the walls of both basement rooms with Milino,a cheap substitute for canvas,stretched string backwards and forwards across the rooms and attached widths of packing-paper to them,so that they reached down to the floor and as far as the walls that I wanted to paint. I wanted to create a labyrinth which would somehow help to prevent a compositional idea from establishing itself all too quickly. I had the idea of working on all the walls pretty well at the same time,as if they were one large painting completely surrounding me. By constantly wandering in the labyrinth I sought to realise a form of “de-composition”."

"Using the scanty means at my disposal I attempted to paint the room together with several objects that I had gathered together,white on white. The white room is an interior to be made devoid of any specific sensualism emanated by objects. Ultimately it is a classic white canvas expanded into three-dimensional space. It was in these surroundings that I rolled across the room,my body wrapped up in pieces of white cloth like a pile of parcels. The pieces of cloth unwound themselves from my tense body,which for a long time remained in a catatonic position,with the soles of both my feet stuck as it were to the wall.[...] I had planned to do some bodypainting for the second part of the performance.[...] At first I poured black paint over the white objects,I painted Anni with the aim of making a “living painting”. But gradually a certain uncertainty crept in. This was caused by jealous fight between two photographers,which ended by one of them leaving the room in a rage.[...] My unease increased,as I became aware of the defects in my “score”-and should this not have any,the mistakes in the way I was translating it into actions. Recognising this,I succumbed to a fit of painting which was like an instinct breaking through. I jammed myself into a step-ladder that had fallen over and on which I had previously done the most dreadful gymnastic exercises,and daubed the walls in frantic despair-until I was exhausted. The very last hour of “informel”. Mühl angrily ridiculed my relapse into a “technique” that had to be overcome."

"My body is the intention. My body is the event. My body is the result."

"“Ritual” might be an acceptable term, if shorn of its overtly religious connotations.For me,breaking taboos became nothing less than a stylistic means. I allowed my body, my self, to be pushed into such extreme situations that certain norms of social behaviour could only appear utterly absurd to me."

"Total actions are a further development of the happening and combine the elements of all art forms, painting music, literature, film, theatre, which have been so infected by the progressive process of cretinisation in our society that any examination of reality has become impossible using these means alone. Total actions are the unprejudiced examination of all the materials that make up reality. Total actions take place in a consciously delineated area of reality with deliberately selected materials. They are partial, dynamic occurrences in which the most varied materials and elements of reality are linked,swapped over,turn on their heads and destroyed. This procedure creates the occurrence. The actual nature of the occurrence depends on the composition of the material and actors′ unconscious tendencies. Anything may constitute the material: people, animals, plants, food, space, movement, noise, smells, light, fire, coldness, warmth, wind, dust, steam, gas, events, sport, all art forms and all art products. All the possibilities of the material are ruthlessly exhausted. As a result of the incalculable possibilities for choices that the material presents to the actor,he plunges into a concentrated whirl of action finds himself suddenly in a reality without barriers, performs actions resembling those of a madman,and avails himself of a fool′s privileges,which is probably not without significance for sensible people. Old art forms seek to reconstruct reality,total actions unfold within reality itself. Total actions are direct occurrences(direct art),not the repetition of an occurrence,a direct encounter between unconscious elements and reality(material). The actor performs and himself becomes material: stuttering, stammering, burbling, groaning, choking, shouting, screeching, laughing, spitting, biting, creeping, rolling about in the material."

"Oswald Wiener had just dropped by. We were watching a football world championship game. Suddenly,in the middle of a game with Germany,the reporter said,“Bertie Vogts slid in like an Irrwisch [Jack-o’-Lantern]”. Eureka! That was the title I was looking for,and Oswald wiener commented,“That fits perfectly-an irrer Wisch”"

"I think my actions,like those of my associates,were possible in this form only in vienna. Our heritage was the vienna secession and Austrian expression,and that,along with the violent disapproval of our work,explains not only its frequently overwrought and aggressive character,but also its radical psychological insights."

"Self-painting is a further development of the art of painting. The surface of an image has lost its function as the sole means of conveying expression. It was taken back to its roots,to the wall,to the object,to the living being,to the human body. By using my body as a means of conveying expression,the result created is a happening captured by a camera as it progresses,and an experience which viewers can share."

"The white room is an interior to be made devoid of any specific sensualism emanated by objects. Ultimately it is classic white canvas expanded into three-dimensional space."

"Pure painting or the art of drawing whose point of departure is based on purely formal criteria is,in my opinion, passé. I do not reject it if other artists make attempts,but as far as I am concerned,this is what I believe. if I do not place a text next to my drawings,I consider the work on such programmes to be futile."

"In simple terms: art has not been a public nuisance for quite a while now. either the people have become well-behaved or the perpetrators of nuisances have become tired."

"Art is gushing hot bile on the fields and harvesting the looks of nasty dwarfs."

"The seven dwarfs were devastated when an eighth joined them one morning before they went to work. He went straight into their house,took little plates and cutlery out of his waistcoat,grabbed the mining tools and was the first dwarf to set off for work. Caught off-guard by his cheeky but honest manner,the others followed,angry because he was showing them the way along the path they took every day and surprised when they found he had turned into dark grotto into a glass palace with Snow White hewn in gold. For these established prospectors it was terrible to behold the intruder appropriating for himself the right to mine the virgin goldmine."

"I want to cover all areas that can be depicted visually. This ranges from fairytales to attempts to enter the abstract and view oneself as a social outcast or someone struggling to stay alive."

"Art is created in a state of delirium. Anyting else is the restoration of monuments. Collectors are artist that do not have a home. they have to make one for themselves."

"In fact,my art generally nauseated me. Often,when I wanted to set down a poem on an uncontaminated piece of paper,I′d start feeling sick and I did actually throw up in front of many drawings. I tremble all over in front of each picture-poem and before every action I would swallow a jar of pressed vine vermin. Time and again I strove for a kind of non-art,and time and again I failed,like a chimpanzee wanting to throw away a banana without peeling it. My disgust at producing art naturally atracted collectors,and ocassionaly photographers."

"My picture-poems are linguistic margins on visual atolls."

"For me,the Bild-Dichtung[image-poem] is the ideal form,because the drawing process is constantly being interrupted or contrasted by the writing. And since I always have something to say when I am writing,the effort has a balancing effect. Drawing and writing are wonderful complements."

"Writing without making mistakes is like vomiting hot air."

"Poetry is when words are robbed of their attributed truth."

"In a certain sense,I never left Actionism as I understood it to this very day. Today,I work in “sittings” that are very similar to the course of the actions. Only the stage has changed on which the presentation takes place."

"The pencil-stroke is like cutting into the heart."

"My thinking at that time was determined by a kind of willfully repressed pleasure[Freude] in Freud ,and I wanted to be as artistically direct as plumber illustrating the history of art with a spanner."

"Analogously to Arnulf Rainer′s ‘overpaintings’,and extending these with my own actionistic resources, the artist′s head should be in the picture ,should become one with the picture, and disappear in it."

"Being covered in white paint ,you demonstrate behaviour intended to create a public nuisance,which did in fact cause offence to members of the public ,and created a breach of the peace and public order."

"Color will play no part in the art of future."

"I hate people,who force their way through at traffic accidents to see blood. They...rape and dismember virgins,and have orgies."

"You become an artist to upset your family."

"Creative children do not paint. They mess around. If they have to draw,creative children always end up being the ridiculous kind of child,who produces childern′s drawings Creative children wipe spinach round their gobs,that′s all. Any thing more that these crappy daubnings is the result of education-and before long we′re on a level with Paul Klee."

"As a boy,I was extremely shy,certainly as a result of my upbringing. I was an expert blusher,and some of my harsh actions may echo this shyness by way of compensation."

"Majorca,Spring 1960: As chance would have it-and chance always has something up its sleeve-I bumped into another academic renegade. He was about to leave for Majorca,where,he said,two stone houses were waiting for him and for me. So off we went. On the boat from Barcelona it was bitterly cold,and I arrived in Palma like a lump of ice on two sticks. My stone house was an aesthetic delight,especially as there was no furniture at all in it. We made straight for the local fishing village,where we soon met an Englishman suffering from a skin disease who lent us two matrasses. Later,other European artistic refugees arrived at the Café Marinero, including a Pole called Foot who had fought in the French army against what he called "very romantic barbarians". he painted too, alternately in monochrome and in abstract expressionist style. Abstract Expressionism was the only style practised by Joan Merritt,a brilliant woman from the United States. She transformed an artistic nature reserve into a jungle. In Franco´s empire you had to report to the Guardia Civil once a week. It was the same ritual every time. You knocked on the door and a voice answered "Un momentino!" You waited until eventually receiving a very loud command: "Entra!" A man with a big stomach,a moustache and a cigar would be leaning backwards in his chair at a desk with an oversize telephone. You stood in silence. The official would pick up the receiver and make an official call. A pin-up calendar hung on the wall,displaying a senorita in a skin-coloured bathing costume. Then the official leafed through your passport and bashed a stamp into it. A second ritual was Sunday mass, the Catholic way. It was conveyed by loudspeakers to the outside world, so it could be heard miles away. A third ritual was collecting your post.For obvious reasons,the Generalísimo would not allow post offices all over the place. In our village he left things to an itinerant clerk-cum-supervisor. she set up her office in one "cervecería"or another, as fancy took her. You entered the room and nodded silently to the other foreigners,all of us always somehow suspicious. A mother´s-milk monster with strictly arranged hair, a Generalísima, would be sitting behind a table on which she´d piled letters that had arrived. When she wasn´t disappearing into a backroom she´d occasionally call out a name. The whole business often lasted as long as the deep sleep of a dreaming donkey. Once you´d been given your post you had to go to the man with the moustache and cigar. The first ritual was then repeated, before the stamped postage stamp was stamped out of existence. Despite this, life in the fishing village was genuinely worth living. The sun shone every day,the fish were cheap,the wine even cheaper and mineral water free. The café proprietor reaked of tobacco and his customers smelled a fish. One fisherman had lost three fingers,and the lavatory´s aroma lay over the whole room. Once,when I was drunk,I called the Englishman with skin disease a "fucking bastard" and he scratched away at his scabs in fury. Red wine flowed from the barrels and murky blood trickled out of eyes. Smoke rushed through the room,the landlord fell over a barrel and,unbelievably,got up straightaway and refilled his own and customers´ glasses with what he had. this time,it was a bitter-tasting liqueur,spiced with filterless Peninsulares cigarettes. everyone smelled of ham and sweaty feet,and you´d sometimes tread on a rotten olive. One day a blonde Danish woman came to the Café Marinero,got to know me and invited me to her house,where she showed me her housekeeper,a local,who was pining for her unfaithful boyfriend. And there was an American woman who introduced me to My Fair Lady. Finally,I met an émigré Mongolian fisherman who couldn´t swim and drowned without a hope in the world. The fishing village had a soporiphic effect. Even when you were sitting at the bar and had to look for the owner to order another glass of red wine,it felt as though you were in a dream. And you were still dreaming when you crept along the dusty alleys with their weathered walls to visit the village barber. That man cropped my hair once. He sat down in a chair he´d probably got from a doctor. He begun practising his craft behind my right ear,worked his way up to the parting-and then vanished. I looked through some magazines he´d probably got from a dentist. Eventually,I decided to get down from the chair,which he´d wound up high,and went through several alleys looking for him. And Io and behold- there he was,waving down at me from a roof he was helping to tile. There I stood, like a half-finished Mohican, and carried on dreaming. Having grasped the way, fatalistic system worked, I returned to the barber´s shop,where you could also buy sweets,soap,toothpaste"

"The highest expression of all morality is: Be!"

"Man must act in such a way that the whole of his individuality lies in each moment."

"Most of the time man does not do what he wills, but what he has willed. Through his decisions, he always gives himself only a certain direction, in which he then moves until the next moment of reflection. We do not will continuously, we only will intermittently, piece by piece. We thus save ourselves from willing: principle of the economy of the will. But the higher man always experiences this as thoroughly immoral."

"That is why man can also never understand himself: For he is himself a timeless act; an act which he performs continuously, and there is no moment in which he might not perform it, as there would have to be to understand himself."

"Psychologism is the most comfortable conception of life, because according to it there are no longer any more problems. That is why it also condemns all solutions from the outset, since it acknowledges the actual problems as little as the idea of truth."

"Idiocy: crudeness’ intellectual equivalent."

"People should also not want to determine themselves causally in such a way: I will now … become good once and for all, and do good by nature, because I could not then do anything else. For through this one denies the freedom which can in each moment negate all the past. … One makes himself into an object when one establishes causality in that way; for a morality to which I have been compelled is already not a morality."

"If man were not free, then he could not conceive of causality at all, and could not form any concept of it. Insight into lawfulness is already freedom from it."

"In men of genius, sterile years precede productive years, these again to be followed by sterility, the barren periods being marked by psychological self-depreciation, by the feeling that they are less than other men; times in which the remembrance of the creative periods is a torment, and when they envy those who go about undisturbed by such penalties. Just as his moments of ecstasy are more poignant, so are the periods of depression of a man of genius more intense than those of other men [Wie seine Ekstasen gewaltiger sind als die der anderen, so sind auch seine Depressionen fürchterlicher]. Every great man has such periods, of longer or shorter duration, times in which he loses self-confidence, … times in which, indeed, he may be sowing the seeds of a future harvest, but which are devoid of the stimulus to production."

"Great men take themselves and the world too seriously to become what is called merely intellectual. Men who are merely intellectual are insincere; they are people who have never really been deeply engrossed by things and who do not feel an overpowering desire for production. All that they care about is that their work should glitter and sparkle like a well-cut stone, not that it should illuminate anything. They are more occupied with what will be said of what they think than by the thoughts themselves."

"There are men who are willing to marry a woman they do not care about merely because she is admired by other men. Such a relation exists between many men and their thoughts."

"In order to depict a man one must understand him, and to understand him one must be like him; in order to portray his psychological activities one must be able to reproduce them in oneself. To understand a man one must have his nature in oneself."

"To understand a man is really to be that man."

"No one can understand himself, for to do that he would have to get outside himself; the subject of the knowing and willing activity would have to become its own object."

"So far as one understands a man, one is that man. The man of genius takes his place in the above argument as he who understands incomparably more other beings than the average man. Goethe is said to have said of himself that there was no vice or crime of which he could not trace the tendency in himself, and that at some period of his life he could not have understood fully. The genius, therefore, is a more complicated, more richly endowed, more varied man; and a man is the closer to being a genius the more men he has in his personality, and the more really and strongly he has these others within him."

"No two moments in the life of an individual are exactly alike; there is between the later and the earlier periods only the similarity of the higher and lower parts of a spiral ascent."

"In men of genius, sterile years precede productive years, these again to be followed by sterility, the barren periods being marked by psychological self-depreciation, by the feeling that they are less than other men; times in which the remembrance of the creative periods is a torment, and when they envy those who go about undisturbed by such penalties. Just as his moments of ecstasy are more poignant, so are the periods of depression of a man of genius more intense than those of other men."

"The number of different aspects that the face of a man has assumed may be taken almost as a physiognomical measure of his … genius."

"Zola, who has so faithfully described the impulse to commit murder, did not himself commit a murder, because there were so many other characters in him. The actual murderer is in the grasp of his own disposition: the author describing the murder is swayed by a whole kingdom of impulses. Zola would know the desire for murder much better than the actual murderer would know it, he would recognise it in himself, if it really came to the surface in him, and he would be prepared for it. In such ways the criminal instincts in great men are intellectualised and turned to artistic purposes as in the case of Zola, or to philosophic purposes as with Kant, but not to actual crime."

"In the case of complex personalities the matter stands thus: one of these can understand other men better than they can understand themselves, because within himself he has not only the character he is grasping, but also its opposite. Duality is necessary for observation and comprehension."

"Colour-blindness always extends to the complementary colours. Those who are red blind are also green blind; those who are blind to blue have no consciousness of yellow. This law holds good for all mental phenomena; it is a fundamental condition of consciousness."

"Genius declares itself to be a kind of higher masculinity."

"Universality is the distinguishing mark of genius. There is no such thing as a special genius, a genius for mathematics, or for music, or even for chess, but only a universal genius. … The theory of special genius, according to which for instance, it is supposed that a musical genius should be a fool at other subjects, confuses genius with talent. … There are many kinds of talent, but only one kind of genius, and that is able to choose any kind of talent and master it."

"Woman, in short, has an unconscious life, man a conscious life, and the genius the most conscious life."

"As the mental endowment of a man varies with the organisation of his accumulated experiences, the better endowed he is, the more readily will he be able to remember his whole past, everything that he has ever thought or heard, seen or done, perceived or felt, the more completely in fact will he be able to reproduce his whole life. Universal remembrance of all its experiences, therefore, is the surest, most general, and most easily proved mark of a genius."

"If it really were the case, as popular opinion has tried to establish, that the genius were separated from ordinary men by a thick wall through which no sound could penetrate, then all understanding of the efforts of genius would be denied to ordinary men, and their works would fail to make any impression on them. All hopes of progress depend on this being untrue. And it is untrue. The difference between men of genius and the others is quantitative not qualitative, of degree not of kind."

"There is, moreover, very little sense in preventing young people from giving expression to their ideas on the pretext that they have less experience than have older persons. There are many who may live a thousand years without encountering experience of any value. It could only be in a society of persons equally gifted that such an idea could have any meaning."

"The psychical condition of men’s minds may be compared with a set of bells close together, and so arranged that in the ordinary man a bell rings only when one beside it sounds, and the vibration lasts only a moment. In the genius, when a bell sounds it vibrates so strongly that it sets in action the whole series, and remains in action throughout life. The latter kind of movement often gives rise to extraordinary conditions and absurd impulses, that may last for weeks together and that form the basis of the supposed kinship of genius with insanity."

"With ordinary men the moments which are united in a close continuity out of the original discrete multiplicity are very few, and the course of their lives resembles a little brook, whereas with the genius it is more like a mighty river into which all the little rivulets flow from afar; that is to say, the universal comprehension of genius vibrates to no experience in which all the individual moments have not been gathered up and stored."

"A man is first reverent about himself, and self-respect is the first stage in reverence for all things."

"A man is himself important precisely in proportion that all things seem important to him."

"The great genius does not let his work be determined by the concrete finite conditions that surround him, whilst it is from these that the work of the statesman takes its direction and its termination. … It is the genius in reality and not the other who is the creator of history, for it is only the genius who is outside and unconditioned by history."

"The great man of science, unless he is also a philosopher, … deserves the title of genius as little as the man of action."

"Memory, then, is a necessary part of the logical faculty. … The proposition A = A must have a psychological relation to time, otherwise it would be At1 = At2."

"A creature that cannot grasp the mutual exclusiveness of A and not A has no difficulty in lying; more than that, such a creature has not even any consciousness of lying, being without a standard of truth."

"That which enables man to have a real relation to truth and which removes his temptation to lie, must be something independent of all time, something absolutely unchangeable, which as faithfully reproduces the old as if it were new, because it is permanent itself; it can only be that source in which all discrete experiences unite and which creates from the first a continuous existence. It is what produces the feeling of responsibility which oppresses all men, young and old, as to their actions, which makes them know that they are responsible, which leads to the phenomena of repentance and consciousness of sin, which calls to account before an eternal and ever present self things that are long past, its judgment being subtler and more comprehensive than that of any court of law or of the laws of society, and which is exerted by the individual himself quite independently of all social codes (so condemning the moral psychology which would derive morality from the social life of man)."

"The logical axioms are the principle of all truth. These posit an existence towards which all cognition serves. Logic is a law which must be obeyed, and man realises himself only in so far as he is logical. He finds himself in cognition. All error must be felt to be crime. And so man must not err. He must find the truth."

"The deepest, the intelligible, part of the nature of man is that part which does not take refuge in causality, but which chooses in freedom the good or the bad."

"Not only virtue, but also insight, not only sanctity but also wisdom, are the duties and tasks of mankind."

"Man is alone in the world, in tremendous eternal isolation. He has no object outside himself; lives for nothing else; he is far removed from being the slave of his wishes, of his abilities, of his necessities; he stands far above social ethics; he is alone. Thus he becomes one and all."

"Feelings of love and gratitude arise directly and spontaneously in the baby in response to the love and care of his mother."

""In Wien mußt' erst sterben, damit sie dich hochleben lassen. Aber dann lebst' lang." - (In Vienna you first 've to die, before they celebrate you. But then you're living long.) - Necrology in german magazine DER SPIEGEL 6. Okt. 1986. Sometimes falsely attributed to Johann Hölzel, known as the musician Falco."

"Österreich ist ein Labyrinth, in dem sich jeder auskennt. Helmut Qualtinger" - (Austria is a labyrinth everbody in is familiar with.) - Print over the post stamp "Am Steinernen Meer Salzburg", austrian Post AG (federal postal service), 1. Juli 2003; Austria-Forum.org, Überdruckmarke "Zitat Qualtinger"

"Donald O'Brien (actor) about Helmuth Qualtinger in his last role in "The Name of the Rose": "[...] And there was one brilliant German or Austrian actor on this movie who looked like Falstaff, big, fat guy, a marvellous presence. Helmut Qualtinger was his name. He was terrific!" - in Gunslingers, Cannibals, and more... An Interview with Donald O´Brien (March 1996), Christian Kessler for Euro Trash Cinema magazine"

"For almost a quarter of a century the affairs of the world and its ideas have been in indescribable confusion. In most cases the confusion of ideas is manifest without the aid of polemic or controversy. It is simple evidence of the chaotic state of the world."

"The succession of events since 1914 has swept away so many illusions that even a summary inspection of the heap of ideological ruins would demand the compilation of a veritable encyclopaedia. The summer of 1914 witnessed the collapse of all those hopes which had been built on a peaceful evolution of the capitalist world, and it also witnessed the breakdown of ."

"The world crisis which began in 1929, the longest ever known, caused people entirely unconnected with and even hostile to the working-class movement to speak of 'crisis' and even of the 'collapse of capitalism'. [...] The economic and financial smash of 1929 ruthlessly disposed of the illusion that capitalism was about to experience an era of lasting prosperity and harmony. Liberalism observed with horror that the actual course of ignored all its good advice. Today the doctrine of liberalism is practically dead, but, at least, its few remaining defenders can console themselves by noting the disastrous effects of ."

"Bolshevism, which once aspired to supplant tottering capitalism, is now in a state of incurable degeneration both at home in Russia and internationally."

"The dictatorships, whether Fascist or Bolshevist, have been able to conceal their innumerable defeats only by ruthlessly using both the gag and the lie."

"Many people declare that democracy, too, is bankrupt. It is certainly true that democracy has lost much ground in recent years, and is now face to face with a serious crisis, but we do not believe that it is bankrupt."

"In the general collapse of values all around us it is not surprising that Marxism should also be subjected to critical attacks. A failure in the eyes of its enemies, even many of its friends admit that it is going through a severe crisis. Certain self-styled 'orthodox' Marxists, more in love with the letter than the spirit of the writings of Marx and Engels, have provided the less scrupulous critics of Marxism with weighty arguments. However, this category of 'academic Marxists' is becoming less and less numerous, and today we can observe their place being increasingly taken by people with far less knowledge and even greater pretensions: half-a-dozen quotations lifted from this or that popular pamphlet serve them instead of doctrine, and represent in their eyes the sum total of Marxist science. Most of the anti-Marxists of our day reveal the same intellectual poverty."

"The real crisis through which Marxism is passing is not due to this relaxation of intellectual discipline on the part of some of those who call themselves followers of Marx. Unfortunately, the habit of praising or blaming without knowledge of the subject is becoming increasingly common to men of all parties today. This is not due to the failure of this or that doctrine, but to the crisis through which our whole civilisation is passing. At the same time this regrettable tendency adds greatly to the confusion in which all the sociological disputes of our day are taking place."

"Let us define what we mean by Marxism. Is it the doctrine of Marx and Engels? Or is it the movements to which that doctrine has given birth, and which, rightly or wrongly, claim to be Marxist? To what extent are these movements actually inspired by Marxism, and to what extent have they caused it to develop, sometimes reforming, sometimes deforming it? Are these movements still really Marxist in the classic sense? Or do perhaps both friends and enemies of Marxism often harbour a distorted conception of Marx’s original theories? We must therefore ask ourselves whether the so-called crisis of Marxism is not in large measure a crisis of differing posthumous interpretations of Marxism. Karl Marx died in 1883 and Friedrich Engels in 1895. Although a number of their followers have developed their doctrines and provided important supplementary analyses of the modifications experienced by capitalism in the course of the twentieth century, the results of these labours have hardly affected the movement as a whole. In fact, as the movement grew in size, the assimilation even of the ideas of Marx and Engels themselves, which were naturally better known, became slower, more fragmentary and more superficial. In accordance with historical conditions which obviously differed considerably as between country and country, each movement took what best suited it from the original doctrine, and applied its choice (very rarely the Marxist method itself) to its own particular situation."

"In this sense we can speak of a 'decomposition' of Marxism. In ignoring the important fundamental contribution of the followers of Marx, and by insisting exclusively on the phenomenon of superficial adaptation and variation, Sorel passed in silence over all that was healthy, live and fruitful in the Marxist doctrine."

"Marxist theoreticians have heard too much, in season and out of season, about 'the crisis of Marxism' to be unduly moved by the latest anti-Marxist challenge, particularly as it coincided, oddly enough, with the practical confirmation of the essential theses of Karl Marx in the economic crash of 1929-36. In writing this book it was certainly not our intention to rebut the old stale arguments once again with old and equally stale answers. The same well-worn gramophone record has given satisfaction since the end of the last century."

"Marxism is not a dogma at all; it is a method of investigation. Seeing that the conditions of our day differ considerably from those studied by Marx, what are the new problems which contemporary Marxism has to solve? They certainly cannot be solved by reeling off a few quotations learned by heart."

"The celebrated phrase, 'so much the worse for the facts', would satisfy only the high priests of Marxism, for Marxism also has its high priests, and these priests, like all others, daily deny the principles they claim to defend. Bolshevism is a living proof of this."

"The self in the psychoanalytic sense is variable and by no means coextensive with the limits of the personality as assessed by an observer of the social field."

"States the self may expand far beyond the borders of the individual, or it may shrink and become identical with a single one of his actions or aims."

"The antithesis to narcissism is not the object relation but object love."

"The creative individual, whether in art or science, is less psychologically separated from his surroundings than the non-creative one; the "I-you" barrier is not as clearly defined."

"“Ayodhya, an ancient Indian city, where the first Indian monarchs on the Ganges resided, was situated on the river Deva, in the latitude of 250, exactly in the spot where Faizabad now stands. It was the birthplace of Shirama, or Rama, an Indian hero, or the younger Bacchus, whose heroic achievements were celebrated in songs before the times of the Pagan Indians.”"

"The manner in which he [Tipu] behaved to the inhabitants of Calicut was horrid. A great part of them, both male and female, were hung. He first tied up the mothers, and then suspended the children from their necks. The cruel tyrant caused several Christians and Heathens [Hindus] to be brought out naked, and made fast to the feet of his elephants, which were then obliged to drag them about till their limbs fell in pieces from their bodies. At the same time, he ordered all the churches and temples to be burned or pulled down or destroyed in some manner. Christian and pagan [Hindu] women were compelled to marry Mohammedans. The pagans were deprived of the token of their nobility, which is a lock of hair called kudumi; and every Christian, who appeared in the streets, must either submit to be circumcised, or be hanged on the spot. This happened in the year 1789, at which time I resided at Verapole [Varapali in Travancore]. I had then an opportunity of conversing with several Christians and Pagans, who had escaped from the fury of this merciless tyrant; and I assisted these fugitives to procure a boat to enable them to cross the river which runs past that city. This persecution continued till the 15th of April 1790."

"Jealousy differs from envy in being infinitely more spiteful, as well as more impassioned and less restrained. Jealousy arises out of an opinion as to what is one’s due; it is not purely a sense of inferiority, as is envy."

"Proverbs in many languages agree that the greatest damage done by the envious man is to himself. Envy is described as an utterly destructive, uncreative and even diseased state of mind for which there is no remedy."

"It is not true, as many social critics would have us believe, that only the more fortunate people in this world, those with inherited possessions or chance wealth, have a vested interest in an ideology that inhibits envy. Such an ideology is in fact much more important to the envy-prone person, who can begin to make something of his life only when he has hammered out some sort of personal theory which diverts his attention from the enviable good fortune of others, and guides his energies towards realistic objectives within his scope."

"To many, the desire to overcome their envy may have been a genuine incentive for positive achievements, and hence have led to satisfaction in a sense of achievement."

"Many well-meant proposals for the ‘good society’ or the completely ‘just society’ are doomed because they are based on the false premise that this must be a society in which there is nothing left for anyone to envy. This situation can never occur because, as is demonstrable, man inevitably discover something new to envy. In the utopian society in which we all would have not only the same clothes but the same facial expressions, one person would still envy the other for those imagined, innermost feelings which would enable him, beneath the egalitarian mask, to harbor his own private thoughts and emotions."

"From this the merciful effect of private property is evident, though it is seldom recognized. It is not the cause of destructive envy, as the apostles of equality are always seeking to persuade us, but a necessary protective screen between people. Wherever there have ceased to be any enviable material goods or where these have for some reason been withdrawn from envy’s field of vision, we get the evil eye and envious, destructive hatred directed against the physical person. It might almost be said that private property first arose as a protective measure against other people’s envy of our physical qualities."

"I have no doubt that one of the most important motives for joining an egalitarian political movement is this anxious sense of guilt: ‘Let us set up a society in which no one is envious.’"

"Perhaps the utopia of equality, of a society redeemed from envy, exerts so strong an attraction upon intellectuals, generation after generation, because it promises always to remain a utopia, and perpetually to legitimize new demands. Nothing could be worse for the utopian intellectual than a society where there was nothing left to criticize."

"Overwhelming and astounding inequality, especially when it has an element of the unattainable, arouses far less envy than minimal inequality, which inevitably causes the envious to think: I might have been in his place."

"The best means of protection against the envy of a neighbor is to drive a Rolls-Royce instead of a car only slightly better than his...overwhelming and astounding inequality arouses far less envy than minimal inequality."

"It was adorned with many fine temples and monuments; among others, with a pillar cut out of one stone, twenty four yards high, at the top of which stood the image of Garuda, half-man and half-eagle."

"The Surij Bagh is probably on the site of the once famous city of Parihasapur, of the marvels of which the native legends speak so highly. This city was built by the great conqueror Lalitaditya, who reigned from A.D. 714 to 750, and was adorned with many fine temples and monuments; among others, with a pillar cut out of one stone, twenty-four yards high, at the top of which stood the image of Garuda, half-man, half-eagle. Sikandar Budh Shikan probably destroyed it, but several fragments were seen in 1727 by Mohammed Azim. Immense images of gold, silver, and other metals, also adorned the interior, but all traces of this splendour have disappeared."

"Only one thing is certain. People get out of life exactly what they put into it."

"I well remember the time, after the First World War, when one needed a tillion-mark note to buy a dozen eggs. Since paper, however, was still valuable, the bank notes were stored in gigantic silos which stood in the yards of our factories. In these we children made tunnels and played among the billions and trillions — a strange introduction to money, but perhaps it helped me to realize how worthless it can become when man-made values change."

"Millions of people had been uprooted by the war and could not adapt themselves to a new way of life. On the other hand, certain people had grown rich and powerful."

"Both the peacock and the chicken passed through [Mesopotamia] on their way westward[;] the Sumerians called the chicken ‘ the bird from Meluhha’ and the Syrians called it the ‘Akkadian bird’."

"Anarchists like to blame the ruthlessness of capitalists and their cronies for their failures – or the backstabbing of Marxists."

"If anarchists want to be revolutionaries, they need to present models of revolution that differ from the Leninist one but are more substantial than the hope for some kind of historical magic."

"The political strength of a term comes from its application. No appliers, no strength."

"Anarchists will in all likelihood not lead a revolution in the near future – or ever, considering the paradox implicit in the idea itself."

"We stand in the midst of a massive reorganization of our intellectual and spiritual life, which has seized all areas of this life—not least in medicine. The central idea of the new Reich—that the whole is more than its parts, and that the Volk is more important than the individual—had to bring about fundamental changes in our whole attitude, since this regards the nation’s most precious asset, its health."