Philosophers From The United States

"However faith in an idea is frowned upon in scientific circles, but no new concept or idea, or discovery, ever came unless there was first faith that it indeed existed."

"Hatred does not exist as a basic psychological structure. It is, however, the result of psychological manipulation of fear; and fear is not a basic psychological structure."

"Telepathy accounts for the usefulness of spoken language. Without telepathy no language would be intelligible."

"One dream can change the development of a personality, and change his physical course."

"Hypnotism will become more and more a tool of scientific investigation. Telepathy will be proven without a doubt, and utilized, sadly enough in the beginning, for purposes of war and intrigue. Nevertheless telepathy will enable your race to make its first contact with alien intelligence."

"Your plane is a training place in the use of manipulation of energy."

"Free will as I mentioned earlier certainly does operate, but you must remember that while it does operate, personalities on your plane are extremely limited as to choice. They can only choose to operate within their own camouflage pattern framework."

"Full use of the inner senses is not even for me yet."

"A personality will not choose unfavorable circumstances of rebirth until he himself sees that necessary discipline can be achieved in no other manner. Therefore extremely hot and extremely cold countries go largely undeveloped."

"The fact is that your plane originated because enough entities needed certain types of experience to warrant such a creation, and they set about forming it through the process of evolution."

"Suggestion can shape dreams, and the dreams themselves then operate as action. A strong dream can be a more significant psychic action than any physical experience, and it can change the course of the personality completely."

"The emotions come closer than anything else to the vividness of inner data."

"The personality when it leaves your plane for good will have developed its potentials as far as it possibly can."

"Intellectual truth alone will not make you free, though it is certainly a necessary preliminary. If this were the case your walls would fall away, since intellectually you understand their rather dubious nature. Since feeling is so often the cohesive with which mind builds, it is feeling itself which must be changed if you would find freedom from your particular plane of existence at your particular time."

"Neither of you have a need for children in your present personalities. You are almost finished with incarnations on the earth, so much so that the physical bodies will return completely and unfragmented upon your physical death. This is always the case in the final earth life. The physical property is left behind, no portion of it being carried on that plane through children."

"Any such material, received through the board, through automatic writing, or voice communication, should be carefully studied. Generally speaking, if your messages claim to originate from famous dead personalities, you can discount them as valid information. In all probability, they are creative fabrications of your own personal subconscious."

"For this reason, all the experiments in this book should be supplemented with a healthy outgoing attitude toward other people and relationships. If you are already a withdrawn, introspective person, you should make efforts to relate yourself with others through outside activities. This will ensure a balanced growth of your abilities, and the gradual acceptance of your inner abilities by your conscious mind."

"Q. Can you give us more information concerning the name Ruburt? A. That was Jane's name long ago as yours was Joseph. Both represented high points for your entities, images in the mental genes, blueprints for the spirit to follow. Joseph and Ruburt represent the full scope of your earthly personalities, towards which you must grow. But in another sense, you are already Joseph and Ruburt, since the blueprint exists. Through each life the individual tries to follow his. The pattern is not imposed, but is the entity's own outline."

"Our first introduction to Frank Withers came on December 2, 1963. In our earlier sessions, we had never been able to maintain any consistency between one sitting and another. When the Seth sessions began, one session began to instantly reinforce earlier ones. Seth specified that we have sessions twice a week, naming the evenings and the time. Sessions varied from two to three hours each. Sometimes they were longer. We have followed this schedule ever since, and sessions still continue."

"Your own inner capabilities and potentials are more varied and powerful than you realize. The purpose of this book is to enable you to recognize and use them in daily life. You use them now, but in a subdued and inefficient manner. They work in spite of you."

"We might have a chance now to rebuild it all with what we have left. We might have learned that we can exist only as a part of nature, not apart from nature."

"We didn't have a chance to form the world we were born into. Now we have the opportunity to make a new one."

"It is my contention that if a large body of strong healthy men do not exist as a pool of hope for the race, then the race has no chance to survive. If twenty million starved neurotics manage to live through the plague, does this mean that humanity survives?" He paused, throwing the question at them and waiting until they formed their own answer. Then he shouted, "No, it does not! What is humanity, a physical form only? I say it is more. It is intellect and reason and dignity. It is these qualities that must survive, not the mere number of twisted sickly bodies."

"At one time, the race depended upon quantity for survival," Toby said. "Now it is destroying itself. We believe that man's unique characteristics, imagination, psychic understanding, sympathy, and so forth, are being undermined. Even if the race survives physically, it won't be the same race. We won't be bright enough to recognize our fall from grace, either; that's the hell of it. Tests show that though our mental capacity is as great as ever, our use of it has slumped to an astonishing degree."

"Our purpose is implicit in our name. We're rebelling against life as it is for the masses of people. We believe that man can be a creature of dignity, integrity, and creativity. Filth, starvation, crowded quarters lead to man's degeneration as a biological species, and indeed, will result in his extinction."

"Now, he was filled with a distaste for a civilization in which the individual was so prone and in which he must be so diligent just to preserve his sanity."

"It's your knowledge of the past that we're concerned with. Manuscripts and all kinds of important information has been withheld from the public for so many generations that we're held back ourselves. We have to know what was tried in order to see where the race failed. We're in a very peculiar position. At one time the Rebellers had a positive plan of action. We still know what we're rebelling against, but we have no idea of what sort of civilization we want to put in place of what we have now."

"If Utrillo's paintings depicted actual scenes from life, if they were not imaginative pictorial fantasies, then the whole world would have had to be completely different. If Utrillo's representation was valid, then it would mean that mankind had regressed to an astonishing, almost unbelievable degree. All the things that Fitch believed man capable of enjoying -- dignity, solitude, integrity -- would have been experienced in the past. And that, he thought, was impossible. If men had ever possessed these benefits, they would never have given them up."

"The routine in the gallery seemed eternal. The artists ate a skimpy breakfast, worked from seven in the morning until noon, ate lunch when lunch was available, exercised by shift in the courtyard below, worked again till six, ate dinner, and worked from seven until eight-thirty. The gallery housed writers, artists, and a few musicians. Sexes were segregated. Every two weeks the men and women were allowed to mix indiscriminately. Any children born were immediately put in the outside government nurseries where they were brought up as workers, beginning in the fields or chemical gardens at the age of six."

"When I think of me as a psychic, I get hung up because I seem to be in the company of so many nuts. Writers may be as nuts as anyone else but it's a nuttiness that doesn't bug me -- there's no dogma attached."

"My mother was a strong, domineering woman, probably scared to death of the position she found herself in She was psychotic, attempting suicide several times and scaring the devil out of me as a kid with threats . . . One day [she] would say that she loved me, and the next day she'd scream that she was sorry I'd ever been born -- that I'd ruined her life . . . [She] would often stuff her mouth with cotton and hold her breath, pretending that she was dead, to scare me when I was small. Sometimes she'd tell me she really could walk and during the night she was going to get up, turn on the gas jets, and kill us both. I would be absolutely terrified . . . And yet . . . she encouraged my writing and would tell me that I was a good kid and she didn't know why she acted that way . . . but then she'd do it again."

"The Wright brothers flew right through the smoke screen of impossibility."

"We find that in research a certain amount of intelligent ignorance is essential to progress; for, if you know too much, you won't try the thing."

"We think we are smart because we have been flying for about sixty years. Birds and bees and butterflies have been flying for hundreds of thousands of years."

"There are two kinds of courage. One is a spontaneous explosion of aroused instincts to meet some sudden emergency; the other is steadfast and enduring against repeated failures and rebuffs. It's what boxers call 'the fighting heart,' the will to come bouncing back every time one is knocked down. All pioneers need that kind of courage, and our youngsters will need plenty of it when they plunge into the world of tomorrow.""

"Why is the human skull as dense as it is? Nowadays we can send a message around the world in one-seventh of a second, but it takes years to drive an idea through a quarter-inch of human skull."

"You are always too late with a development if you are so slow that people demand it before you yourself recognize it. The research department should have foreseen what was necessary and had it ready to a point where people never knew they wanted it until it was made available to them."

"Logic is a way of going wrong systematically."

"The key to economic prosperity is the organized creation of dissatisfaction."

"A problem thoroughly understood is always fairly simple. Found your opinions on facts, not prejudices. We know too many things that are not true."

"The whole fun of living is trying to make something better."

"You know, you read about the future. You can't help that. I don't look upon the future. I am not a politician. I am not worried about the future at all. I don't like to run it down. I don't like to think of it being too dark because I expect to spend all the rest of my life there and I don't want to have a nasty end to it."

"Fast drivers can see no further than slow drivers, but they must look further down the road to time their reactions safely. Similarly, people with great projects afoot habitually look further and more clearly into the future than people who are mired in day-to-day concerns. These former control the future because by necessity they must project themselves into it; and the upshot is that, like ambitious settlers, they stake out larger plots and homesteads of time than the rest of us. They do not easily grow sad or old; they are seldom intimidated by the alarms and confusions of the present because they have something greater of their own, some sense of their large and coherent motion in time, to compare the present with."

"Our units of temporal measurement, from seconds on up to months, are so complicated, asymmetrical and disjunctive so as to make coherent mental reckoning in time all but impossible. Indeed, had some tyrannical god contrived to enslave our minds to time, to make it all but impossible for us to escape subjection to sodden routines and unpleasant surprises, he could hardly have done better than handing down our present system. It is like a set of trapezoidal building blocks, with no vertical or horizontal surfaces, like a language in which the simplest thought demands ornate constructions, useless particles and lengthy circumlocutions. Unlike the more successful patterns of language and science, which enable us to face experience boldly or at least level-headedly, our system of temporal calculation silently and persistently encourages our terror of time. ... It is as though architects had to measure length in feet, width in meters and height in ells; as though basic instruction manuals demanded a knowledge of five different languages. It is no wonder then that we often look into our own immediate past or future, last Tuesday or a week from Sunday, with feelings of helpless confusion."

"No one, not even a philosopher, is morally obligated to live as if the world were the way he wishes it were. Robert Nozick pays taxes and is entitled to enjoy the government benefits they finance --even benefits he thinks should not exist. Perhaps the libertarian philosopher should not be expected to opt out of rent control voluntarily. But should he be pursuing his landlord through the maze of rent control regulations like a man possessed? And should he be using his ability to make a nuisance of himself under these regulations for simple, if lawful, cash extortion? They say that policeman make the best burglars. After a few years on the job, they know all the tricks. The same thing seems to be true of philosophers. If you're looking for someone to manipulate a rent control ordinance, find an advocate of the free market."

"Hayek and Nozick both think that talk of distributive justice is misleading, because it suggests the presence of a distributing person or mechanism; in a developed economy there is no such thing, and in a free society, the attempt to institute such a thing would destroy all freedom. Hayek, however, supports this view with an account of the computational impossibility of deciding what to produce and distribute in order to achieve justice, while Nozick is more concerned to emphasize that the state has no right to seize the resources of individuals in order to distribute them according to any principle whatever."

"Nozick’s Theory, in spite of its apparent dedication to self-ownership, cannot escape the conclusion that women’s entitlement rights to those they produce must take priority of persons’ rights to themselves at birth. ... There is nothing about a woman’s production of an infant that does not easily fulfill the conditions of the principle of acquisition as Nozick specifies them."

"Given the extensive involvement of state violence in the process by which the corporate elite not only achieved its wealth in the past but continues to maintain and augment it in the present, it is clear that the massive inequalities of wealth that characterise present-day ‘capitalist’ society are radically inconsistent with any approach to justice in holdings that is even remotely Nozickian."

"His learning is enormous and interconnected … His ability to surround a subject, to anticipate objection, to see through weakness and pretense, to exact all the implications of a contention, to ask a huge number of relevant questions about a seemingly settled matter, to enlarge into full significance what has only been sketched by others, is amazing."

"No contemporary philosopher possesses a more imaginative mind, broader interests, or greater dialectical abilities than Robert Nozick."