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Robert Anton Wilson

Robert Anton Wilson (18 January 1932 – 11 January 2007) was an American novelist, essayist, absurdist philosopher, futurist, and guerilla ontologist, most famous for his satirical work (with Robert Shea), The Illuminatus! Trilogy.
 * See also:
 * The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Quotes

 * Most of our ancestors were not perfect ladies and gentlemen. The majority of them weren't even mammals.
 * Cosmic Trigger I: The Final Secret of the Illuminati (1977), p. 84

 * I first heard of the 23 Enigma from William S. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, Nova Express, etc. According to Burroughs, he had known a certain Captain Clark, around 1960 in Tangier, who once bragged that he had been sailing 23 years without an accident. That very day, Clark’s ship had an accident that killed him and everybody else aboard. Furthermore, while Burroughs was thinking about this crude example of the irony of the gods that evening, a bulletin on the radio announced the crash of an airliner in Florida, USA. The pilot was another Captain Clark and the flight was Flight 23.
 * "The 23 Phenomenon" in Fortean Times 23 (1977), also quoted in "The hidden roots of the 23 Enigma" by Theo Paijmans at the Charles Forte Institute (13 May 2010)

 * There is no governor anywhere; you are all absolutely free. There is no restraint that cannot be escaped. We are all absolutely free. If everybody could go into dhyana at will, nobody could be controlled — by fear of prison, by fear of whips or electroshock, by fear of death, even. All existing society is based on keeping those fears alive, to control the masses. Ten people who know would be more dangerous than a million armed anarchists.
 * Hugh Crane a.k.a. Cagliostro the Great, in Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy : The Trick Top Hat (1979)

 * Guerrilla ontology The basic technique of all my books. Ontology is the study of being; the guerrilla approach is to so mix the elements of each book that the reader must decide on each page 'How much of this is real and how much is a put-on?'"
 * The Illuminati Papers (1980), p. 2

 *  'The person we think we are have been manufactured out of some [| shotgun wedding] of history and and imagination.'"
 * The Illuminati Papers (1980), p. 61

 * It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.
 * The Illuminati Papers (1980), p. 111

 * The Western World has been brainwashed by Aristotle for the last 2,500 years. The unconscious, not quite articulate, belief of most Occidentals is that there is one map which adequately represents reality. By sheer good luck, every Occidental thinks he or she has the map that fits. Guerrilla ontology, to me, involves shaking up that certainty. I use what in modern physics is called the "multi-model" approach, which is the idea that there is more than one model to cover a given set of facts. As I've said, novel writing involves learning to think like other people. My novels are written so as to force the reader to see things through different reality grids rather than through a single grid. It's important to abolish the unconscious dogmatism that makes people think their way of looking at reality is the only sane way of viewing the world. My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone, but agnosticism about everything. If one can only see things according to one's own belief system, one is destined to become virtually deaf, dumb, and blind. It's only possible to see people when one is able to see the world as others see it. That's what guerrilla ontology is — breaking down this one-model view and giving people a multi-model perspective.
 * "Robert Anton Wilson: Searching For Cosmic Intelligence" - interview with Jeffrey Elliot (1980)

 * My early work is politically anarchist fiction, in that I was an anarchist for a long period of time. I'm not an anarchist any longer, because I've concluded that anarchism is an impractical ideal. Nowadays, I regard myself as a libertarian. I suppose an anarchist would say, paraphrasing what Marx said about agnostics being "frightened atheists," that libertarians are simply frightened anarchists. Having just stated the case for the opposition, I will go along and agree with them: yes, I am frightened. I'm a libertarian because I don't trust the people as much as anarchists do. I want to see government limited as much as possible; I would like to see it reduced back to where it was in Jefferson's time, or even smaller. But I would not like to see it abolished. I think the average American, if left totally free, would act exactly like Idi Amin. I don't trust the people any more than I trust the government.
 * "Robert Anton Wilson: Searching For Cosmic Intelligence" - interview by Jeffrey Elliot (1980)

 * A true initiation never ends.
 * Masks of the Illuminati (1981), p. 257

 * "Every national border in Europe," El Eswad added ironically, "marks the place where two gangs of bandits got too exhausted to kill each other anymore and signed a treaty. Patriotism is the delusion that one of these gangs of bandits is better than all the others."
 * The Earth Will Shake: The History of the Early Illuminati (The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles Vol. 1) (1982), p. 100

Resistance to new information, however, has a strong neurological foundation in all animals, as indicated by studies of imprinting and conditioning. '''Most animals, including most domesticated primates (humans) show a truly staggering ability to "ignore" certain kinds of information — that which does not "fit" their imprinted/conditioned reality-tunnel. We generally call this "conservatism" or "stupidity", but it appears in all parts of the political spectrum, and in learned societies as well as in the Ku Klux Klan.'''
 * Obviously, the faster we process information, the more rich and complex our models or glosses — our reality-tunnels — will become.
 * Quantum Psychology : How Brain Software Programs You and Your World (1990), p. 45

 * Every war results from the struggle for markets and spheres of influence, and every war is sold to the public by professional liars and totally sincere religious maniacs, as a Holy Crusade to save God and Goodness from Satan and Evil.
 * Cosmic Trigger II : Down to Earth (1991)

 * Every morning I have been looking at CNN to see if there is any reason for hope. I see a few large and impressive peace protests here and there around the world, but mostly I see empty robot faces monotonously reciting the magic incantations, "We must support the President" and "We must support our troops", both of which mean the killing must continue.
 * Cosmic Trigger II: Down to Earth (1991)

 * We live in an age of artificial scarcity, maintained by ignorance and fear. The government has been paying farmers not to grow food for fifty years--while millions starve. Labor unions, business and government conspire to hold back the Microprocessor Revolution--because none of them know how to deal with the massive unemployment it will cause. (Fuller's books could tell them.) The utilities advertise continually that "solar power is at least forty years in the future" when my friend Karl Hess, and hundreds of others, already live in largely solar-powered houses. These propaganda advertisements are just a delaying action, because the utilities still haven't figured out how to put a meter between us and the sun.
 * Right Where You Are Sitting Now: Further Tales of the Illuminati. Berkeley, CA: Ronin Pub., 1993. p. 144.

 * I'm using myself as a typical 20th century model as I'm trying to make sense out of the world around me … typical in the sense of being one of the damn good models around these days. I am typical in the sense that ...a lot of people are on the same wave length as me. I get fan mail from people that are absolutely stunned that there's somebody else besides themselves who thinks this way. So, we're a minority, but there are a lot of us. On a planet this overcrowded, a minority can have a few million numbers. … More scientific than religious. More open than dogmatic. More optimistic than pessimistic. More future oriented than past oriented. And more humorous than serious. I really dread serious people. Especially serious, dogmatic people. I regard them as sort of what Reich called the emotional plague. I regard them as very dangerous.
 * "Robert Anton Wilson on Wilhelm Reich" (March 1995)

 * He {Wilhelm Reich} had a great capacity to arouse irrational hatred obviously, and that's because his ideas were radical in the most extreme sense of the word "radical." His ideas have something to offend everybody, and he ended up becoming the only heretic in American history whose books were literally burned by the government. Timothy Leary spent five years in prison for unorthodox scientific ideas. Ezra Pound spent 13 years in a nuthouse for unorthodox political and economic ideas. Their books were not burned. Reich was not only thrown in prison, but they chopped up all the scientific equipment in his laboratory with axes and burned all of his books in an incinerator. Now that interests me as a civil liberties issue. When I started studying Reich's works, I went through a period of enthusiasm, followed by a period of skepticism, followed by a period of just continued interest, but I think a lot of his ideas probably were sound. A lot probably were unsound. And, I'm not a Reichian in the sense of somebody who thinks he was the greatest scientist who ever lived and discovered the basic secrets of psychology, physics and everything else, all in one lifetime. But I think he has enough sound ideas that his unpopular ideas deserve further investigation.
 * "Robert Anton Wilson on Wilhelm Reich" (March 1995)

 * Well I sometimes call myself a libertarian but that's only because most people don't know what anarchist means. Most people hear you're an anarchist and they think you're getting ready to throw a bomb at a building. They don't understand the concept of voluntary association, the whole concept of replacing force with voluntary cooperation or contractual arrangements and so on. So libertarian is a clearer word that doesn't arouse any immediate anxiety upon the listener. And then again, libertarians, if they were totally consistent with their principles would be anarchists. They take the position which they call minarchy, which is the smallest possible government... The reason I don't believe in the smallest possible government is because we started out with that and it only took us 200 years to arrive at the czarist occupation of government that we have now. I think any government is dangerous no matter how small you make it. Instead of governments we should have contractual associations that you can opt out of if you don't like the way the association is going. Religions fought for hundreds of years over which one should dominate Europe and then they finally gave up and made a truce, and they all agreed to tolerate each other — at least in this part of the world... But I think government should be treated like religion, everyone should be able to pick the kind they like. Only it should be contractual not obligatory. I wouldn't mind paying tax money to a local association to maintain a police force, as long as we need one. But I hate like hell paying taxes to help the US government build more nuclear missiles to blow up more people I don't even know and don't think I'd hate them if I did know them. A lot of anarchists had a major roll in influencing my political thinking, especially the individualist anarchists. Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner especially. But I've also been influenced by Leo Tolstoy's anarcho-pacifism. And I find a lot of Kropotkin compatible even though he was a communist anarchist. Nothing wrong with communist anarchism as long as it remains voluntary. Any one that wants to go make a commune, go ahead, do it. I got nothing against it. As long as there's room to the individualist to do his or her own thing.
 * Interview in TSOG (2002) (sound file)

 * I used to be an atheist, until I realized I had nothing to shout during blowjobs. "Oh Random Chance! Oh Random Chance!" just doesn't cut it….
 * DragonCon, 2000
 * This quote is knowingly or otherwise lifted from Bill Hicks' comedy routine, or vice versa.

 * Following Korzybski, I put things in probabilities, not absolutes... My only originality lies in applying this zetetic attitude outside the hardest of the hard sciences, physics, to softer sciences and then to non-sciences like politics, ideology, jury verdicts and, of course, conspiracy theory.
 * Interview in High Times (2003)

 * Groups are grammatical fictions; only individuals exist, and each individual is different.

 * I don't believe anything, but I have many suspicions.
 * "RAW Thoughts" at rawilson.com

 * I regard the two major male archetypes in 20th Century literature as Leopold Bloom and Hannibal Lecter. M.D. Bloom, the perpetual victim, the kind and gentle fellow who finishes last, represented an astonishing breakthrough to new levels of realism in the novel, and also symbolized the view of humanity that hardly anybody could deny c. 1900-1950. History, sociology, economics, psychology et al. confirmed Joyce’s view of Everyman as victim. Bloom, exploited and downtrodden by the Brits for being Irish and rejected by many of the Irish for being Jewish, does indeed epiphanize humanity in the first half of the 20th Century. And he remains a nice guy despite everything that happens... Dr Lecter, my candidate for the male archetype of 1951-2000, will never win any Nice Guy awards, I fear, but he symbolizes our age as totally as Bloom symbolized his. Hannibal's wit, erudition, insight into others, artistic sensitivity, scientific knowledge etc. make him almost a walking one man encyclopedia of Western civilization. As for his "hobbies" as he calls them — well, according to the World Game Institute, since the end of World War II, in which 60,000,000 human beings were murdered by other human beings, 193, 000,000 more humans have been murdered by other humans in brush wars, revolutions, insurrections etc. What better symbol of our age than a serial killer? Hell, can you think of any recent U.S. President who doesn't belong in the Serial Killer Hall of Fame? And their motives make no more sense, and no less sense, than Dr Lecter's Darwinian one-man effort to rid the planet of those he finds outstandingly loutish and uncouth.
 * "Previous Thoughts" at rawilson.com

 * Horror is the natural reaction to the last 5,000 years of history.
 * Cosmic Trigger II : Down to Earth

 * No, they were not exactly automatons, but they did not know what they were doing. They take down a boy’s britches. They stare at his buttocks. They cane him until the buttocks bleed. And they believe this is virtue, because it is done in a school, and it becomes vice only if it is done in a place with a red lantern over the door.
 * The Widow's Son

 * Beyond a certain point, the whole universe becomes a continuous process of initiation.
 * The Widow's Son

 * All phenomena are real in some sense, unreal in some sense, meaningless in some sense, real and meaningless in some sense, unreal and meaningless in some sense, and real and unreal and meaningless in some sense.
 * Nature's God This is a statement derived from one in the Principia Discordia

 * Existence is larger than any model that is not itself the exact size of existence (which has no size...)
 * Nature's God

 * There is absolutely nothing that can be taken for granted in this world.
 * The Historical Illuminatus as spoken by Sigismundo Celine

 * Conspiracy is just another name for coalition.
 * The Historical Illuminatus as spoken by Luigi Duccio

 * The creative faculty, the god-power, is not used here with anything less than literalness. When beauty was created by a godly mind, beauty existed, as surely as the paintings of Botticelli or the concerti of Vivaldi exist. When mercy was created, mercy existed. When guilt was created, guilt existed. Out of a meaningless and pointless existence, we have made meaning and purpose; but since this creative act happens only when we relax after great strain, we feel it as 'pouring into us' from elsewhere. Thus, we do not know our own godhood and we are perpetually swindled by those who assure us that it is indeed elsewhere, but they can give us access to it, for a reasonable fee. And when we as a species were ignorant enough to be duped in that way, the swindlers went one step further, invented original sin and other horrors of that sort, and made us even more 'dependent' upon them.
 * The Historical Illuminatus as spoken by Sigismundo Celine

 * The illusion of Sin and Guilt, the madness of our species, is the act of cursing the world under the misapprehension that one is cursing only one part of it. To curse the fig tree, as in the funniest and most misunderstood parable of Jesus, is to curse the soil in which it grew, the seed, the rains, the sun; the whole world, eventually — because no part is truly separate from the whole. The fallacy is that one can judge the part in isolation from the whole is "the Lie that all men believe."
 * The Historical Illuminatus as spoken by Sigismundo Celine

 * The longer one is alone, the easier it is to hear the song of the earth.
 * The Historical Illuminatus as spoken by Sigismundo Celine

 * "Is," "is." "is" — the idiocy of the word haunts me. If it were abolished, human thought might begin to make sense. I don't know what anything "is"; I only know how it seems to me at this moment.
 * The Historical Illuminatus as spoken by Sigismundo Celine

 * Why does the sexual appetite cause so much unspeakable joy and irrational misery, so much suicidal and homicidal madness, and so much absurd theological ranting? Because every sexual choice is going to play a role in determining the temperament and talents of the next generation, and of all future generations who will inherit the earth from us. To be simple about it for once, a single friendly fuck can fill a continent with morons or geniuses in only a few thousand years.
 * The Historical Illuminatus as spoken by Sigismundo Celine

 * The worst that can happen under monarchy is rule by a single imbecile, but democracy often means the rule by an assembly of three or four hundred imbeciles.
 * The Historical Illuminatus as spoken by M. Gabriel Sartines

 * Each mans spills the drink he loves.
 * Cosmic Trigger II

 * Everybody who has ever worked for a corporation knows that corporations conspire all the time. Politicians conspire all the time, pot-dealers conspire not to get caught by the narcs, the world is full of conspiracies. Conspiracy is natural primate behavior.
 * The I in the Triangle, speech held at a bookstore in Santa Cruz, California (1990)

 * The Constitution admittedly has a few defects and blemishes, but it still seems a hell of a lot better than the system we have now.
 * rawilson.com website/blog entry (mid 1990s)

 * Various medical authorities swarm in and out of here predicting I have between two days and two months to live. I think they are guessing. I remain cheerful and unimpressed. I look forward without dogmatic optimism but without dread. I love you all and I deeply implore you to keep the lasagna flying. Please pardon my levity, I don't see how to take death seriously. It seems absurd.
 * "Do Not Go Gently Into That Good Night" final blog entry (6 January 2007)

The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975)

 * There are periods of history when the visions of madmen and dope fiends are a better guide to reality than the common-sense interpretation of data available to the so-called normal mind. This is one such period, if you haven't noticed already.
 * Part I : The Eye in the Pyramid, p. 32

 * ONLY THE MADMAN IS ABSOLUTELY SURE.
 * Part I : The Eye in the Pyramid p. 176 of 1988 edition

 * The individual act of obedience is the cornerstone not only of the strength of authoritarian society but also of its weakness.

 * And Spaceship Earth, that glorious and bloody circus, continued its four-billion-year-long spiral orbit about the Sun; the engineering, I must admit, was so exquisite that none of the passengers felt any motion at all. Those on the dark side of the ship mostly slept and voyaged into worlds of freedom and fantasy; those on the light side moved about the tasks appointed for them by their rulers, or idled waiting for the next order from above.

Prometheus Rising (1983)

 * Comparative religion and philosophy show that the Thinker can regard itself as mortal, as immortal, as both mortal and immortal (the reincarnation model) or even as non-existent (Buddhism). It can think itself into living in a Christian universe, a Marxist universe, a scientific-relativistic universe, or a Nazi universe—among many possibilities. As psychiatrists and psychologists have often observed (much to the chagrin of their medical colleagues), the Thinker can think itself sick, and can even think itself well again. The Prover is a much simpler mechanism. It operates on one law only: Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves. To cite a notorious example which unleashed incredible horrors earlier in this century, if the Thinker thinks that all Jews are rich, the Prover will prove it. It will find evidence that the poorest Jew in the most run-down ghetto has hidden money somewhere.
 * Ch. 1 : The Thinker & The Prover, p. 25

 * Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover will prove. And if the Thinker thinks passionately enough, the Prover will prove the thought so conclusively that you will never talk a person out of such a belief, even if it is something as remarkable as the notion that there is a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft ("GOD") who will spend all eternity torturing people who do not believe in his religion.
 * Ch. 1 : The Thinker & The Prover, p. 28

 * Animals outline their territories with their excretions, humans outline their territories by ink excretions on paper.
 * Ch. 4 : The Anal Emotional Territiorial Circuit, p. 68

 * The current rampages of territorial-emotional pugnacity sweeping this planet are not just another civilization failing … They are the birth-pangs of a cosmic Prometheus rising out of the long nightmare of domesticated primate history.
 * Ch. 5 : Dickens & Joyce : The Two-Circuit Dialectic, p. 90

 *  "Mind" is a tool invented by the universe to see itself; but it can never see all of itself, for much the same reason that you can’t see your own back (without mirrors).
 * Ch. 14 : The Meta Programming Circuit, p. 224

 * Mind and its contents are functionally identical: My wife only exists, for me, in my mind. Not being a solipsist, I recognize the converse: I only exist, for her, in her mind. Lest the reader exclaim, like Byron of Wordworth, "I wish he would explain his explanation!", let us try it this way: If I am so fortunate as to be listening to the Hammerklavier sonata, the only correct answer, if you ask me suddenly, "Who are you?" would be to hum the Hammerklavier. For, with music of that quality, one is hypnotized into rapt attention: there is no division between "me" and "my experience".
 * Ch. 14 : The Meta-Programming Circuit, p. 219

Everything Is Under Control (1998)

 * Everything Is Under Control : Conspiracies, Cults, and Cover-Ups (1998)

 * You simply cannot invent any conspiracy theory so ridiculous and obviously satirical that some people somewhere don't already believe it.
 * Introduction, p. 16

 * The A ∴  A  ∴   must rank as the most secretive secret society in the world. Perhaps nobody, not even the few writers who have discussed it, knows for sure when the A  ∴  A  ∴  began, which group claiming to be the A  ∴  A  ∴  at present is the real A  ∴  A  ∴ , or even what the symbols A  ∴  A  ∴  stand for — although many claim to know these things of course. … Occult historians generally agree that V.V.V.V.V. signified Vi Veri Vniversum Vivus Vici ("By the force of truth I have conquered the universe"), one of the eleven magic mottoes of Aleister Crowley.
 * On conspiracy theories involving the A ∴  A  ∴ , and  the leader, known only by the initials V.V.V.V.V., in A  ∴  A  ∴  , p. 21 - 22

 * Most historians merely mention that Bruno was charged with the heresy of teaching Copernican astronomy, but Frances Yates, a historian who specialized in the occult aspects of the scientific revolution, points out that Bruno was charged with 18 heresies and crimes, including the practice of sorcery and organizing secret societies to oppose the Vatican. Yates thinks Bruno may have had a role in the invention of either Rosicrucianism or Freemasonry or both. Bruno's teachings combined the new science of his time with traditional Cabalistic mysticism. He believed in a universe of infinite space with infinite planets, and in a kind of dualistic pantheism, in which the divine is incarnate in every part but always in conflicting forms that both oppose and support each other. Whatever his link with occult secret societies, he influenced Hegel, Marx, theosophy, James Joyce, Timothy Leary, Discordianism, and Dr. Wilhelm Reich.
 * "Giordano Bruno", p. 95

 * Many tribal peoples have both all-male and all-female secret societies, which help maintain the cultural values or reality tunnel. Freemasonry is certainly the largest, and probably the oldest, and still the most controversial of the all-male secret societies surviving in our world. No two scholars can even agree on how old it is, much less on how "good" or "evil" it is. … Although Masonry is often denounced as either a political or religious "conspiracy", Freemasons are forbidden to discuss either politics or religion within the lodge. Gary Dryfoos of the Massachusetts Institute of technology, who maintains the best Masonic site on the web, always stresses these points and also offers personal testimony that after many years as a Mason, including high ranks, he has not yet been asked to engage in pagan or Satanic rituals or plot for any reason for or against any political party. The more rabid anti-Masons, of course, dismiss such testimony as flat lies. The enemies of Masonry, who are usually Roman Catholics or Fundamentalist Protestants, insist that the rites of the order contain "pagan" elements, e.g., the Yule festival, the Spring Solstice festival, the dead-and-resurrected martyr (Jesus, allegedly historical, to Christians; Hiram, admittedly allegorical, to Masons). All these and many other elements in Christianity and Masonry have a long prehistory in paganism, as documented in the 12 volumes of Sir James George Frazer's Golden Bough. The major offense of Masonry to orthodox churches is that it, like our First Amendment, encourages equal tolerance for all religions, and this tends, somewhat, to lessen dogmatic allegiance to any one religion. Those who insist you must accept their dogma fervently and renounce all others as devilish errors, correctly see this Masonic tendency as inimitable [sic] — to their faith.
 * Freemasonry, p. 187; in the final sentence here, inimitable perhaps should be "inimicable"

 * "Elohim," the name for the creative power in Genesis, is a female plural, a fact that generations of learned rabbis and Christian theologians have all explained as merely grammatical convention. The King James and most other Bibles translate it as "God," but if you take the grammar literally, it seems to mean "goddesses." Al Shaddai, god of battles, appears later, and YHWH, mispronounced Jehovah, later still.
 * Genesis, p. 197

 * You need the "is of identity" to describe conspiracy theories. Korzybski would say that proves that illusions, delusions, and "mental" illnesses require the "is" to perpetuate them. (He often said, "Isness is an illness.") Korzybski also popularized the idea that most sentences, especially the sentences that people quarrel over or even go to war over, do not rank as propositions in the logical sense, but belong to the category that Bertrand Russell called propositional functions. They do not have one meaning, as a proposition in logic should have; they have several meanings, like an algebraic function.
 * Language as Conspiracy, p. 277

 * Dr. Wilhelm Reich was condemned for unscientific claims by the Food and Drug Administration in 1956 because of his theories about sexual freedom and his discovery of an alleged "orgone" energy. He quickly became the most world-famous victim of the FDA's quest to impose One True Faith on medical practice in the United States, because the Feds not only destroyed all the equipment in Dr. Reich's experimental laboratory but burned all his books, too, in an incinerator, and then they put him in jail where he died of a heart attack. Since many disapprove of this unconstitutional way of silencing heresy, Dr. Reich has remained a center of controversy. … In addition to his bio-physical heresies, Dr. Reich vastly offended many people by his sociological theory, which holds that fascism is just an exaggerated form of the basic structure of sex-negative societies and has existed under other names in every civilization based on sexual repression. In this theory, the character and muscular armor of the average citizen — a submissive and frightened attitude anchored in body reflexes — causes the average person to want a strong authority figure above them. Tyranny, in this model, is not created by tyrants alone but by neurotic masses who want tyrants.
 * p. 361; some of Wilson's account of the suppression of Reich's ideas and work are slightly exaggerative: though an extensive store of Reich's books mentioning his concepts of orgone energy and the "orgone accumulators" of his laboratory were destroyed, the destruction of his equipment and books was not actually total.

Reality Is What You Can Get Away With (1993, 1996)

 * An illustrated screenplay first published in 1993 and revised in 1996, but not (yet) produced in film.

 * Everyone has a belief system, B.S., the trick is to learn not to take anyone's B.S. too seriously, especially your own.

Attributed

 * The obedient always think of themselves as virtuous, rather than cowardly.

Quotes about Wilson

 * Quotations listed alphabetically by author or work.

 * One of the most profound and important scientific philosophers of this century … His vast intelligence and sharp wit are sufficient to shock and enlighten the most heavily imprinted domesticated primate nervous system.
 * Profile page at Deoxy.org

 * In a world where we are all giants in a pygmy's hut, fighting over the space, he was one of the few trying to knock down the walls and stretch his legs.
 * Revered Roshah

 * Robert Anton Wilson is the unacknowledged elephant in our cultural living room: a direct and indirect influence on popular books, movies, TV shows, music, games, comics, and commentary. … Wilson is a primary source for the ironic style of conspiracism, a sensibility that treats alleged cabals not as intrigues to be exposed or lies to be debunked but as a bizarre mutant mythos to be mined for laughs, metaphors, and social insights.
 * Jesse Walker in "Live From Chapel Perilous : We're living in Robert Anton Wilson's world" in Reason ( December 2003)

title: Robert Anton Wilson


text:
Robert Silverberg

Robert Silverberg (born 15 January 1935) is a prolific author best known for writing science fiction, a multiple winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards.

Quotes

 * Stale is stale and borrowed is borrowed, no matter how original your models may have been.
 * Introduction to New Dimensions 1, edited by Robert Silverberg

 * Autobiography. Apparently one should not name the names of those one has been to bed with, or give explicit figures on the amount of money one has earned, those being the two data most eagerly sought by readers; all the rest is legitimate to reveal.
 * "Sounding Brass, Tinkling Cymbal" in Hell's Cartographers (1975) edited by Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison

 * I enjoyed the late 1960s as much as anyone, and I regarded much of the political ferment of the time as vital to the survival of our society—the Vietnam war might have gone on for many decades more without it. But the era did have its silly side, and the search for the immediately relevant at the expense of the less immediately practical side was, to me, one of the sillier aspects of it. Throwing most of past human knowledge overboard for the sake of bringing about instant social reform did not strike me as an effective way of achieving anything but ignorance. Evidently it seemed that way to others, too: after a while the traditional sciences and historical subjects returned to the curriculum, Shakespeare and Sophocles were allowed back in also, and not a great deal was heard from the earnest, deadly young decreers of non-negotiable demands who had had such power over academic life for a time. (Although a lot of them grew up and became university professors, and they are behind the modern craze for political correctness that has spread so much terror through our academic institutions.)
 * Introduction to Ms. Found in an Abandoned Time Machine (2009) in The Collected Stories Volume 4: Trips 1972-73, ISBN 978-1-596-06212-2, p. 59

We, the Marauders (1958)

 * Dinoli had to clawed himself to first rank in public relations by sheer exertion, coupled with judicious backstabbing.
 * In Science Fiction Quarterly (February 1958), p. 12

 * His name would fade from the front pages in a few days; he knew too much about communications media to believe that his current notoriety would last.
 * p. 67

Company Store (1959)

 * When you poison a man in order to sell him the antidote, you don’t boast about it afterward to the victim!
 * In Star Science Fiction 5, edited by Frederik Pohl, p. 53

Hawksbill Station (1967)

 * Novella which was nominated for the 1968 Hugo Award and for the 1967 Nebula Award. Originally published in Galaxy magazine (August 1967).

 * Political theorists tend to swallow their theories when forced back on pragmatic measures of survival.
 * Section 5

Nightwings (1968)

 * Novella which won the 1969 Hugo Award and was nominated for the 1969 Nebula Award. Originally published in Galaxy magazine (September 1968).

 * It is my craft and my science to Watch. It is yours to jeer. Each of us to our specialty.
 * Section 1

 * I find the world and all it contains extremely fascinating. Is this sinful?
 * Section 4

 * To devote oneself to vigilance when the enemy is an imaginary one is idle, and to congratulate oneself for looking long and well for a foe that is not coming is foolish and sinful. My life has been a waste.
 * Section 5

Thomas the Proclaimer (1972)

 * All page numbers from the first edition of the story in The Day the Sun Stood Still (Book Club edition)

 * I never became a believer. I had a natural predisposition toward skepticism. If you can’t measure it, it isn’t there. That included not only Old Whiskers and His Only Begotten Son, but all the other mystic baggage that people liked to carry around in those tense credulous years: the flying saucers, Zen Buddhism, the Atlantis cult, Hare Krishna, macrobiotics, telepathy and other species of extrasensory perception, theosophy, entropy-worship, astrology, and such. I was willing to accept neutrinos, quasars, the theory of continental drift, and the various species of quarks, because I respected the evidence for their existence; I couldn’t buy the other stuff, the irrational stuff, the assorted opiates of the masses, When the Moon is in the seventh house, etc., etc.—sorry, no.
 * Chapter 3, “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” (p. 76)

 * They could pray, they had the illusion that a divine plan governed this best of all possible worlds, while I was left in bleak, stormy limbo, dismally aware that the universe makes no sense and that the only universal truth there is is that Entropy Eventually Wins.
 * Chapter 3, “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” (p. 76)

 * As we zoomed along on the Chaos Express, I was sometimes tempted toward godliness the way the godly are tempted toward sin. But my love of divine reason left me no way to opt for the irrational.
 * Chapter 3, “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” (p. 77)

 * Anything big and strange always upsets the people in power.
 * Chapter 6, “The Woman Who Is Sore at Heart Reproaches Thomas” (p. 91)

 * May I be struck dead for saying this if I don’t mean it with all my heart: I wish the Lord and all his prophets would disappear and leave us alone. We’ve had enough religion for one season.
 * Chapter 11, “The March to the Sea” (p. 110)

Capricorn Games (1974)

 * Beauty is a magnet: repels some, attracts many, leaves no one unmoved.
 * In The Far Side of Time: Thirteen Original Stories, edited by Roger Elwood; reprinted in The Collected Stories Volume 4: Trips 1972-73, ISBN 978-1-596-06212-2, p. 161

Born with the Dead (1974)

 * Novella which was nominated for the 1975 Hugo Award and won the 1974 Nebula Award. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (April 1974).

 * “Moas aren’t very bright,” Gracchus answers. “That’s one good reason why they became extinct.”

 * Architecturally, the town looked like the worst of all possible cheap-and-sleazy tract developments, but the psychic texture it projected was even more depressing, more like that of one of those ghastly retirement communities, one of the innumerable Leisure Worlds or Sun Manors, those childless joyless retreats where colonies of that other kind of living dead collected to await the last trumpet.

 * He didn’t have to observe the niceties of etiquette when talking to a computer.

 * Unacceptable, maybe. But not unthinkable. Nothing's unthinkable once somebody’s thought it.

Trips (1974)

 * Originally published in Final Stage: The Ultimate Science Fiction Anthology edited by Edward L. Ferman and Barry N. Malzberg; page numbers from the reprint in The Collected Stories Volume 4: Trips 1972-73, ISBN 978-1-596-06212-2.

 * Before you began your travels you were told how essential it was to define your intended role. Were you going to be a tourist, or an explorer, or an infiltrator? Those are the choices that confront anyone arriving at a new place. Each bears its special risks.
 * p. 268

 * To opt for being a tourist is to choose the easiest but most contemptible path; ultimately it’s the most dangerous one, too, in a certain sense. You have to accept the built-in epithets that go with the part: they will think of you as a foolish tourist, an ignorant tourist, a vulgar tourist, a mere tourist. Do you want to be considered mere? Around you able to accept that? Is that really your preferred self-image—baffled, bewildered, led about by the nose? You'll sign up for packaged tours, you'll carry guidebooks and cameras, you'll go to the cathedral and the museums and the marketplace, and you'll remain always on the outside of things, seeing a great deal, experiencing nothing. What a waste! You will be diminished by the very traveling that you thought would expand you. Tourism hollows and parches you. All places become one: a hotel, a smiling, swarthy, sunglassed guide, a bus, a plaza, a fountain, a marketplace, a museum, a cathedral. You are transformed into a feeble shriveled thing made out of glued-together travel folders; you are naked but for your visas; the sum of your life’s adventures is a box of leftover small change from many indistinguishable lands.
 * p. 269

 * Transforming happy primitive farmers into sophisticated twentieth-century agriculturalists is ultimately as useless a pastime as training fleas to jump through hoops.
 * p. 293

Schwartz Between the Galaxies (1974)

 * Short story which was nominated for the 1975 Hugo Award. Originally published in Stellar 1.

 * Schwartz closed his eyes. “My grandmother told me never to get mixed up with economists. Their thinking is muddy and their breath is bad, she said. She also warned me against Yale men. Perverts of the intellect, she called them. So here I am cooped up on an interstellar ship with five hundred alien creatures and one fellow human, and he has to be an economist from Yale.”

 * My life was in crisis. All my values were becoming meaningless. I was discovering that my chosen profession was empty, foolish, as useless as—as playing chess.

 * “Research, he calls it. Research.” Pitkin sneered. “Junkie!” Schwartz matched him sneer for sneer. “Economist!”

Homefaring (1983)

 * Novella which was nominated for the 1983 Nebula Award. Originally published in Amazing Stories (November 1983).

 * It did not seem at all improbable to McCulloch now. The infinite fullness of time brings about everything, he thought: even intelligent lobsters, even a divine octopus.

Against Babylon (1986)

 * Originally published in Omni (May 1986). Page numbers from the story included in the mass market paperback edition "The 1987 Annual World's Best SF" edited by Donald A. Wollheim

 * This time of year, the whole crazy city could go in one big fire storm. There were times that he almost wished that it would. He hated this smoggy, tawdry Babylon of a city, its endless tangle of freeways, the strange-looking houses, the filthy air, the thick, choking, glossy foliage everywhere, the drugs, the booze, the divorces, the laziness, the sleaziness, the porno shops and the naked encounter parlors and the massage joints, the weird people wearing their weird clothes and driving their weird cars and cutting their hair in weird ways. There was a cheapness, a trashiness, about everything here, he thought. Even the mansions and the fancy restaurants were that way: hollow, like slick movie sets. He sometimes felt that the trashiness bothered him more than the out-and-out evil. If you kept sight of your own values you could do battle with evil, but trashiness slipped up around you and infiltrated your soul without your even knowing it. He hoped that his sojourn in Los Angeles was not doing that to him.
 * p. 264

 * He never had really been able to understand what it was that she wanted him for...although he felt certain that she wanted him for something real, that he filled some need for her, as she did for him, which could for lack of a more specific term be called love.
 * p. 276

Hot Times in Magma City (1995)

 * All page numbers from the story included in the mass market paperback edition "Year's Best SF" edited by David G. Hartwell

 * The denizens of Citizens Service Houses are not, as a rule, gifted with a lot of common sense, but they often make up for that by being extremely argumentative and vindictive.
 * p. 56

 * I don't know, Mattison thinks. That’s cool. I don't know, and I hereby give myself permission not to know, and to hell with it.
 * p. 104

A Piece of the Great World (2005)

 * All page numbers from the original publication of the story in "One Million A. D." edited by Gardner Dozois

 * She loaned him books. Worlds were revealed to him: worlds piled on worlds, worlds without end.
 * p. 79

 * Was that, too, destined to thrive awhile and decay and vanish, and be replaced by another, Nortekku wondered? Probably. The earth changes, he thought. Mountains rise, are ground to dust, give way to plains and valleys. Shorelines are drowned; new islands are thrust upward out of the sea. Civilizations are born, die, are forgotten. The planet alone abides, and all that dwells upon it is transient. Contemplating these things, he felt much the richer for all his freshly acquired knowledge. He felt that for the first time he comprehended, at least some small way, the great chain of existence, stretching across time from misty past to unborn future.
 * p. 80

The Emperor and the Maula (2007)

 * All page numbers from the story included in the mass market paperback edition "The New Space Opera" edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan

 * Aristocrats might shrug, but commoners, dreading any collapse of the social order, wanted the rules of behavior to be observed.
 * p. 443

 * I hate no one, sir. It seems a waste of emotional energy.
 * p. 463

 * Not all lawyers are annoying. Some are dead.
 * p. 476

 * Never pass by a chance to shut up.
 * p. 477

The Gate of Worlds (1967)

 * All page numbers from the mass market paperback edition published by Tor ISBN 0-812-55454-X (1st printing, August 1984)

 * Take this as a bit of easy wisdom: people who try to rule over other people are going to be hated.
 * Chapter 1 “Across the Ocean Sea” (p. 23)

 * Like all bureaucrats, he was bewildered by an unpredictable development.
 * Chapter 2 “The Realm of Moctezuma XII” (p. 33)

 * Only a man who doubts his own bravery bristles when called a coward.
 * Chapter 7 “We Play a Little Game” (p. 122)

 * I felt an unmanly pity for the beasts we slew, for I fear I don’t really have the killer instinct. I don’t have the starving instinct either, though, and so I fired away.
 * Chapter 9 “To the Western Sea” (p. 158)

 * A man who lies to himself is the worst liar of all.
 * Chapter 9 “To the Western Sea” (p. 162)

 * The process of changing your mind is a tricky one. You start at Position A, which you hold with stern stubbornness, resolving never to give it up. Then you start to question your original resolution. Is it wise to be so stubborn? Perhaps you should consider alternate ideas. You revise your original inflexibility a little, abandoning Position A and adopting Position B, which is very much like it in most ways, with only a few ifs and maybes added. Then, by a gradual series of compromises, private deals, and shifts of purpose, you slide spinelessly through the alphabet until you arrive at Position Z, the total opposite of your original point of view.
 * Chapter 13 “Sometimes We Never Learn” (pp. 235-236)

Those Who Watch (1967)

 * All page numbers from the mass market paperback edition published by Signet (W8149), 5th printing

 * The priest had once told Rosita Estancia that her younger brother Charley was a damned soul, and Charley had found out about it. In a way, he was rather flattered.
 * Chapter 1 (p. 7)

 * Why conjure up galactic spaceships when meteors were so common?
 * Chapter 3 (p. 26)

 * Evidently a lot of people were yelling “Flying saucer!” tonight, because the announcers were going to great pains to insist that it was nothing but a meteor.
 * Chapter 3 (p. 29)

 * If the Government was going to all this trouble to keep people calm, then there had to be something big to worry about. That much was axiomatic.
 * Chapter 3 (p. 29)

Thorns (1967)

 * All page numbers from the trade paperback omnibus Three Novels published by Bantam Spectra ISBN 0-553-27287-X
 * Nominated for the 1968 Nebula Award and the 1968 Hugo Award.

 * I have come to prefer something looser, a rough sort of definition which says simply that science fiction attempts to portray that which does not exist, a speculative reality, but endeavors to explore the consequences of such a speculation in a rigorous, systematic, and scientifically plausible way.
 * Introduction (p. vi)

 * “The fascination of what’s difficult,” said Chalk. “It spins the world on its bearings.”
 * Chapter 1, “The Song the Neurons Sang” (p. 7)

 * But, though he trusted his intuitive judgments, he rarely acted on them until he had had time to make a more rational reconnaissance.
 * Chapter 5, “Enter Chalk; To Him, Aoudad” (p. 27)

 * Of course, Chalk had little need for further money. It had motivated him once, but not now. Nor did the acquisition of greater power please him much. Despite the customary theories, Chalk had attained sufficient power so that he was willing to stop expanding if only he could be sure of holding what he had. No, it was something else, something inner, that governed his decisions now. When the love of money and the love of power are both sated, the love of love remains.
 * Chapter 5, “Enter Chalk; To Him, Aoudad” (p. 29)

 * She shuttled between impish girlhood and neurotic womanhood.
 * Chapter 18, “To the Toy Fair” (p. 85)

 * “Do I chatter?” “Should I be honest or should I be tactful?”
 * Chapter 21, “And Southward Aye We Fled” (p. 106)

 * She was strikingly ignorant, but he had known that from the start. What he had not known was how quickly her ignorance would cease to seem charming and would begin to seem contemptible.
 * Chapter 21, “And Southward Aye We Fled” (p. 106)

The Man in the Maze (1969)

 * All page numbers from the mass market paperback edition published by Avon

 * I have lost my sense of a universe. They say this is the richest era of human existence; but I think a man can be richer in knowing every atom of a single golden island in a blue sea than by spending his days striding among all the worlds.
 * Chapter 1, section 2 (pp. 13-14)

 * He did not consider the possibility of his own death. At his age, death was still something that happened to other people.
 * Chapter 1, section 3 (p. 17)

 * Forget it. No, don’t forget it. Don’t forget anything. Take a lesson from it: collect all the data before shouting nonsense.
 * Chapter 1, section 3 (p. 18)

 * “I know it stinks. The whole universe stinks, sometimes. Haven’t you discovered that yet?” “It doesn’t have to stink!” Rawlins said sharply, his voice rising. “Is that the lesson you’ve learned in all those years? The universe doesn’t stink. Man stinks! And he does it by voluntary choice because he’d rather stink than smell sweet! We don’t have to lie. We don’t have to cheat. We could opt for honor and decency and—” Rawlins stopped abruptly. In a different tone he said, “I sound young as hell to you, don’t I, Charles?” “You’re entitled to make mistakes,” Boardman said. “That’s what being young is for.” “You genuinely believe and know that there’s a cosmic malevolence in the workings of the universe?” Boardman touched the tips of his thick, short fingers together. “I wouldn’t put it that way. There’s no personal power of darkness running things, any more than there’s a personal power of good. The universe is a big impersonal machine. As it functions it tends to put stress on some of its minor parts, and those parts wear out, and the universe doesn’t give a damn about that, because it can generate replacements. There’s nothing immoral about wearing out parts, but you have to admit that from the point of view of the part under stress it’s a stinking deal.”
 * Chapter 4, section 3 (p. 72)

 * “I’m asking you to do an unpleasant thing for a decent motive. You don’t want to do it, and I understand how you feel, but I’m trying to get you to see that your personal moral code isn’t always the highest factor. In wartime, a soldier shoots to kill because the universe imposes that situation on him. It may be an unjust war, and that might be his brother in the ship he’s aiming at, but the war is real and he has his role.” “Where’s the room for free will in this mechanical universe of yours, Charles?” “There isn’t any. That’s why I say the universe stinks.” “We have no freedom at all?” “The freedom to wriggle a little on the hook.” “Have you felt this way all your life?” “Most of it,” Boardman said. “When you were my age?” “Even earlier.”
 * Chapter 4, section 3 (p. 73)

 * You can make no meaningful evaluations of the universe without the confidence that you are seeing it clearly.
 * Chapter 6, section 8 (p. 89)

 * “The cages are ready in case any of the enemies are captured.” “You mean us?” “Yes. Enemies.” Muller’s eyes glittered with sudden paranoid fury; it was alarming how easily he slipped from rational discourse to that cold blaze. “Homo sapiens. The most dangerous, the most ruthless, the most despicable beast in the universe!” “You say it as if you believe it.” “I do.”
 * Chapter 8 (p. 118)

 * Stand near me and you get sick. Why? It reminds you that you’re an animal too, because you get a full dose of me. So we go round and round in our endless feedback. You hate me because you learn things about your own soul by getting near me. And I hate you because you must draw back from me. What I am, you see, is a plague carrier, and the plague I carry is the truth. My message is that it’s a lucky thing for humanity that we’re shut up each in his own skull. Because if we had even a little drop of telepathy, even the blurry nonverbal thing I’ve got, we’d be unable to stand each other. Human society would be impossible.
 * Chapter 8 (p. 120)

 * The universe is a perilous place. We do our best. Everything else is unimportant.
 * Chapter 12, section 4 (p. 179)

Across a Billion Years (1969)

 * All page numbers from the e-book edition published by Open Road Integrated Media

 * Now, you know I’m no bigot, Lorie. I don’t care how many eyes, tentacles, eating orifices, or antennae an organism happens to have, so long as it knows its stuff. What I object to is having someone who is professionally inferior jacked into an expedition simply for the sake of racial balance.
 * Chapter 1 (p. 14)

 * They equally detest our third boss, who is Pilazinool of Shilamak, the big expert on intuitive analysis. Which means the science of jumping to conclusions. He’s good at it.
 * Chapter 1 (p. 22)

 * The thing about aliens is that they tend to be so alien.
 * Chapter 5 (p. 77)

 * The funeral customs of alien races defy all comprehension. So do the funeral customs of non-alien races. Can you explain to me the virtue of putting dead people in a box and burying the box in the ground?
 * Chapter 6 (p. 95)

 * The higher powers reward us most tenderly by their absence from our lives.
 * Chapter 9 (p. 153)

Up the Line (1969)

 * Nominated for the 1970 Nebula Award and the 1970 Hugo Award.

 * Ignorance can’t be pardoned. Only cured.
 * Chapter 4

Downward to the Earth (1970)

 * All page numbers from the trade paperback omnibus Three Novels published by Bantam Spectra ISBN 0-553-27287-X

 * Nothing was his business, these days. When a man had no business, he had to appoint himself to some. So he was here to do research, ostensibly, which is to say to snoop and spy.
 * Chapter 3 (p. 180)

 * When you treat a rational autonomous creature as though he’s a mere beast, what does that make you?
 * Chapter 7 (p. 231)

The World Inside (1971)

 * All page numbers from the trade paperback omnibus Three Novels published by Bantam Spectra ISBN 0-553-27287-X

 * What counts is what’s happening inside him, his own artistic fulfillment. If he can blow their skulls, that’s a bonus. But this is ecstasy. The whole universe is vibrating around him. A gigantic solo. God himself must have felt this way when he got to work on the first day.
 * Chapter 3 (p. 368)

 * Why should we become like you? We pride ourselves on not being like you.
 * Chapter 6 (p. 451)

 * She seems fond of him. Getting to know him better, as though she has surmounted the barrier of cultural differences that made him seem so alien to her before. And he the same with her. The separations dwindling. Her world is not his, but he thinks he could adjust to some of its unfamiliar assumptions. Strike up a closeness. He’s a man, she’s a woman, right? The basics. All the rest is façade.
 * Chapter 6 (p. 454)

 * But the mighty computer is stupid. Thinking with the speed of light but unable to cross the gaps of intuition.
 * Chapter 7 (p. 483)

A Time of Changes (1971)

 * All page numbers from the mass market paperback edition published by Warner Books ISBN 0-446-34061-8
 * Won the 1972 Nebula Award and was nominated for the 1972 Hugo Award.

 * It is peaceful here. I am far from the fishmongers and the drainers and the wine-peddlers and all those others whose songs of commerce clang in the streets of cities. A man can think; a man can look within his soul, and find those things that have been the shaping of him, and draw them forth, and examine them, and come to know himself.
 * Chapter 7 (p. 21)

 * You may not hold me guilty of sins committed in dreams.
 * Chapter 8 (p. 25)

 * But in this logging camp in the mountains I came to understand that kings are nothing but men set high. The gods do not anoint them, but rather the will of men, and men can strip them of their lofty rank.
 * Chapter 17 (p. 62)

 * How intricately our loins are linked to our minds, and how tricky a thing it is when we embrace a woman while pretending she is another!
 * Chapter 25 (p. 85)

 * The style in which it was written told me much: I found that a man who cannot phrase his thoughts cleanly on paper probably has no thoughts worth notice.
 * Chapter 27 (p. 89)

 * All true enlightenment is illegal at first, within its context.
 * Chapter 31 (p. 110)

 * Knowledge never injures the soul. It only purges that which encrusts and saps the soul.
 * Chapter 31 (p. 110)

 * Love of others begins with love of self.
 * Chapter 35 (p. 126)

 * What value is lineage to a drowning man?
 * Chapter 40 (p. 142)

 * “All my life,” said Schweiz, “has been a quest for plausible reasons to believe in what I know to be irrational.”
 * Chapter 53 (p. 168)

 * My only regrets were for poor tactics, not for faulty principles.
 * Chapter 70 (p. 204)

The Book of Skulls (1972)

 * All page numbers from the first mass market paperback edition published by Signet Books (catalogue number Q5177)
 * Nominated for the 1972 Nebula Award and for the 1973 Hugo Award.

 * Morality after the fact, said Eli from the rear, is worse than no morality at all.
 * Chapter 7 (p. 25)

 * Why should that be, LuAnn? Why should we be put into such a wonderful world and then have everything taken away from us? God’s will? No, LuAnn, God is love, and God wouldn’t have done such a cruel thing to us, so therefore there is no God, there’s only death, Death, whom we must reject.
 * Chapter 8 (pp. 29-30)

 * The more you succeed in making out of yourself, the more bitter a thing it is to have to die.
 * Chapter 15 (p. 62)

 * Contrast is everything, Ned said. Incongruity is essential. The secret of art lies in attaining a sense of proper juxtapositions, and what is religion if not a category of art?
 * Chapter 18 (p. 70)

The Stochastic Man (1975)

 * All page numbers from the mass market paperback edition published by Fawcett Gold Medal Books
 * Nominated for the 1976 Nebula Award and the 1976 Hugo Award.

 * We are born by accident into a purely random universe.
 * Chapter 1, (p. 1; opening words)

 * In the absolute universe all events can be regarded as absolutely deterministic, and if we can’t perceive the greater structures, it’s because our vision is faulty. If we had a real grasp of causality down to the molecular level, we wouldn’t need to rely on mathematical approximations, on statistics and probabilities, in making predictions. If our perceptions of cause and effect were only good enough, we’d be able to attain absolute knowledge of what is to come. We would make ourselves all-seeing.
 * Chapter 3 (p. 11)

 * Gottfried, like any true dictator, liked to surround himself with bland obliging ciphers.
 * Chapter 7 (p. 27)

 * “This isn’t just consulting work, Haig. It means going into politics.” “So?” “What do I need it for?” “Nobody needs anything except a little food and water now and then. The rest is preferences.”
 * Chapter 8 (p. 33)

 * No man ever looked more like a President than Harding; it was his only qualification for the job, but it was enough to get him there.
 * Chapter 12 (p. 55)

 * So it is with all the great leaders: the commodity they have to sell is personality. Mere ideas can be left to lesser men.
 * Chapter 13 (p. 73)

 * It’s not a philosophy, Mr. Nichols. It’s an accommodation to the nature of reality.
 * Chapter 16 (p. 98)

 * Thus does the unyielding, inescapable future ineluctably devour the present.
 * Chapter 29 (p. 161)

 * I think we made love three times that final summer. Made love! Preposterous euphemism for fucking, almost as bad as the most grotesque of all, slept together. Whatever Sundara and I made, in those three pressings of flesh to flesh, love couldn’t have been the commodity; we made sweat, we made rumpled sheets, we made heavy breathing, we even made orgasms, but love? Love?
 * Chapter 29 (p. 162)

Lord Valentine's Castle (1980)

 * All page numbers from the mass market paperback edition published by Eos, July 2000 ISBN 0-06-105487-9
 * Nominated for the 1981 Hugo Award.

 * Am I loyal, or am I loyal? But I don’t like the way things are going. It’s a citizen’s right to worry about the state of the realm, isn’t it? If matters are not to our liking, we should speak up. That’s our tradition, isn’t it? If we allow small abuses now, who knows what sort of things he’ll be doing five years on!
 * Book 1 “The Book of the King of Dreams”, Chapter 8 (p. 48)

 * “What matters,” he said earnestly, “is the display of skill, not the manners of the audience.”
 * Book 1, Chapter 10 (p. 71)

 * “You speak very generally,” Valentine said. “I am an oracle, and oracles are never terribly specific,” she replied lightly.
 * Book 1, Chapter 12 (p. 93)

 * I think power is a sickness and governing is a folly for madmen.
 * Book 1, Chapter 15 (p. 113)

 * “Come,” Deliamber said. “There is a vast journey ahead of us.” “I know. That’s why I don’t want to get up.”
 * Book 3 “The Book of the Isle of Sleep”, Chapter 2 (p. 231)

 * “But why?” he asked Deliamber. The Vroon replied, “Why? is a useless question in matters of spiritual progress.”
 * Book 3, Chapter 8 (p. 301)

 * “We are not accustomed to threats here,” Lorivade declared. “I make no threat. I speak only of inevitable consequences.”
 * Book 3, Chapter 10 (p. 317)

 * The Barjazid does not yet rule as an absolute tyrant, for that might turn the people against him, and he is still insecure in his power—while you live. But he rules for himself and for his family, not for Majipoor. He lacks a sense of right, and does only what seems useful and expedient. As his confidence grows, so too will his crimes, until Majipoor groans under the whip of a monster.
 * Book 3, Chapter 11 (p. 329)

 * They were apt to be disappointed with the way he fulfilled his promises to them, for he intended, if he could, to sweep both the bickering rivals from power. But he did not ask pure and total saintliness of himself in his dealings with those whose chief role in the government appeared to be to impede and obstruct.
 * Book 4 “The Book of the Labyrinth”, Chapter 7 (p. 383)

 * Deliamber shrugged. “Such things are never fairly distributed. What makes you think that only the guilty are punished?” “The Divine—” “Why do you think the Divine is fair? In the long run, all wrongs are righted, every minus is balanced with a plus, the columns are totaled and the totals are found correct. But that’s in the long run. We must live in the short run, and matters are often unjust there. The compensating forces of the universe make all the accounts come out even, but they grind down the good as well as the wicked in the process.”
 * Book 5 “The Book of the Castle”, Chapter 4 (pp. 424-425)

 * How frail, he thought, is the compact that holds our government together! Good will alone is all that sustains it.
 * Book 5, Chapter 6 (p. 442)

Letters from Atlantis (1990)

 * All page numbers from the mass market paperback edition published by Warner Books (Questar Science Fiction), June 1992 ISBN 0-446-36286-7

 * The King is an absolute monarch, and I mean absolute. Whatever he says, goes. There’s no council of nobles, no senate, nothing that remotely challenges the King’s authority. He’s got courtiers and bureaucrats, sure, but the whole empire is essentially his own private property, to rule as he pleases. It sounds like a recipe for disaster. Certainly such an arrangement always has been, in historical times. No empire can hope to have an unbroken string of capable rulers. This king or that one might be all right, and maybe as much as a century can go along without any troublemakers reaching the throne. But sooner or later some madman is bound to come along, a Nero or a Caligula or a Hitler, somebody who won’t be able to handle absolute power, who runs amok and causes terrible chaos.
 * Chapter 5 (p. 51)

 * He named the names of gods. He named the names of kings—the secret names, the names they had worn as princes, before they became the newest Harinamur. He called upon all the forces of the universe to free himself from— Me.
 * Chapter 7 (p. 83)

 * There’s no use trying to kid myself with cheery little uplifting cliches. I’ve been forced right up against the underlying truth of things. What a dark and cruel place the world is, for all its beauty, for all its wonder! We have miracles around us on every side—a spiderweb is a miracle, Lora!—but we also have violence, insanity, terrible disease, sudden death. The same Nature that brings us the mountains and the rivers and the green glistening meadows brings us the hurricane, the earthquake, the flood of red-hot lava rolling toward the city.
 * Chapter 11 (pp. 124-125)

 * I could have given him false consolation then, I suppose. I could have lied, and said that what he had seen was a fever dream, a fantasy, that Athilan would endure forever and a day. But I’m not much good at lying. And I knew that he wasn’t looking for lies from me, or consolations, or anything else that might make him feel good for a moment at the expense of the truth.
 * Chapter 12 (p. 129)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Robert Silverberg


text:
User:Supergee~enwikiquote

I am the person known as "supergee" in livejournal.

title: User:Supergee~enwikiquote


text:
Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Teresa Nielsen Hayden (born 21 March 1956) is an American science fiction editor, fanzine writer, essayist, and teacher. She works at Tor Books and maintains a blog called Making Light, both in the company of her husband, Patrick Nielsen Hayden.

Quotes

 * My own personal theory is that this is the very dawn of the world. We're hardly more than an eyeblink away from the fall of Troy, and scarcely an interglaciation removed from the Altamira cave painters. We live in extremely interesting ancient times. I like this idea. It encourages us to be earnest and ingenious and brave, as befits ancestral peoples; but keeps us from deciding that because we don't know all the answers, they must be unknowable and thus unprofitable to pursue.
 * On Time (1995) at nielsenhayden.com, accessed May 9, 2014.

 * I deeply resent the way this administration makes me feel like a nutbar conspiracy theorist.
 * Post to Electrolite (29 January 2003); Republished at nielsenhayden.com/electrolite/archives/002301, accessed May 9, 2014.

title: Teresa Nielsen Hayden


text:
Thomas Szasz

Thomas Szasz (April 15, 1920 – September 8, 2012) was a Professor Emeritus in Psychiatry at the State University of New York Health Science Center in Syracuse, New York, and a noted critic of the moral and scientific foundations of psychiatry.

Quotes

 * Mental illness, of course, is not literally a "thing" — or physical object — and hence it can "exist" only in the same sort of way in which other theoretical concepts exist. Yet, familiar theories are in the habit of posing, sooner or later — at least to those who come to believe in them — as "objective truths" (or "facts"). During certain historical periods, explanatory conceptions such as deities, witches, and microorganisms appeared not only as theories but as self-evident causes of a vast number of events. I submit that today mental illness is widely regarded in a somewhat similar fashion, that is, as the cause of innumerable diverse happenings. As an antidote to the complacent use of the notion of mental illness — whether as a self-evident phenomenon, theory, or cause — let us ask this question: What is meant when it is asserted that someone is mentally ill? In what follows I shall describe briefly the main uses to which the concept of mental illness has been put. I shall argue that this notion has outlived whatever usefulness it might have had and that it now functions merely as a convenient myth.
 * "The Myth of Mental Illness" in American Psycholigist, Vol. 15 (1960), p. 113

 * Our adversaries are not demons, witches, fate, or mental illness. We have no enemy whom we can fight, exorcise, or dispel by "cure." What we do have are problems in living — whether these be biologic, economic, political, or sociopsychological. In this essay I was concerned only with problems belonging in the last mentioned category, and within this group mainly with those pertaining to moral values. The field to which modern psychiatry addresses itself is vast, and I made no effort to encompass it all. My argument was limited to the proposition that mental illness is a myth, whose function it is to disguise and thus render more palatable the bitter pill of moral conflicts in human relations.
 * "The Myth of Mental Illness" in American Psycholigist, Vol. 15 (1960), p. 115.

 * In the past, men created witches: now they create mental patients.
 * The Manufacture of Madness (1970).

 * Religious and medical propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding, I hold some simple truths to be self-evident. One of these truths is that just as the dead do not rise from the grave, so drugs do not commit crimes. The dead remain dead. Drugs are inert chemicals that have no effect on human beings who choose not to use them. No one has to smoke cigarettes, and no one has to shoot heroin. People smoke cigarettes because they want to, and they shoot heroin because they want to.
 * "The Protocols of the Learned Experts on Heroin" in The Libertarian Review, July 1981, p. 14.

 * For millennia, the dialectic of vilification and deification and, more generally, of invalidation and validation—excluding the individual from the group as an evil outsider or including him in it as a member in good standing—was cast in the imagery and rhetoric of magic and religion. ... With the decline of the religious world view and the ascent of the scientific method during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the religious rhetoric of validation and invalidation was gradually replaced by the scientific. One of the most dramatic results of this transformation is the lexicon of psychiatric diagnoses functioning as a powerful, but largely unacknowledged, rhetoric of rejection and stigmatization.
 * "The Sane Slave: Social Control and Legal Psychiatry," American Criminal Law Review, vol. 10 (1971), p. 333.

 * What had been drapetomania became depression. ... Modern man runs away from a life that seems to him a kind of slavery.
 * "The Sane Slave: Social Control and Legal Psychiatry," American Criminal Law Review, vol. 10 (1971), p. 346.

The Second Sin (1973)

 * In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined.
 * p. 20.

 * Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.
 * "Emotions", p. 36.

 * Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.
 * "Emotions", p. 36.

 * Anxiety is the unwillingness to play even when you know the odds are for you. Courage is the willingness to play even when you know the odds are against you.
 * "Emotions", p. 36.

 * Judges and prosecutors, lawyers and psychiatrists, all protest their passionate desire to know why a person accused of a crime did what he did. But their actions completely belie their words: their efforts are now directed toward letting everyone speak in court but the defendant himself -- especially if he is accused of a political or psychiatric crime.
 * "Law", p. 40.

 * Prostitution is said to be the world’s oldest profession. It is, indeed, a model of all professional work: the worker relinquishes control over himself … in exchange for money. Because of the passivity it entails, this is a difficult and, for many, a distasteful role.
 * p. 45.

 * People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds; it is something one creates.
 * p. 49.

 * Two wrongs don't make a right, but they make a good excuse.
 * P. 49.

 * The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naïve forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget.
 * "Personal Conduct", p. 51.

 * The wise treat self-respect as non-negotiable, and will not trade it for health or wealth or anything else.
 * p. 56.

 * Marx said that religion was the opiate of the people. In the United States today, opiates are the religion of the people.
 * "Drugs", p. 63.

 * The Nazis spoke of having a Jewish problem. We now speak of having a drug-abuse problem. Actually, “Jewish problem” was the name the Germans gave to their persecution of the Jews; “drug-abuse problem” is the name we give to the persecution of people who use certain drugs.
 * p. 64.

 * Since this is the age of science, not religion, psychiatrists are our rabbis, heroin is our pork, and the addict is the unclean person.
 * p. 64.

 * We speak of a person being “under the influence” of alcohol, or heroin, or amphetamine, and believe that these substances affect him so profoundly as to render him utterly helpless in their grip. We thus consider it scientifically justified to take the most stringent precautions against these things and often prohibit their nonmedical, or even their medical, use. But a person may be under the influence not only of material substances but also of spiritual ideas and sentiments, such as patriotism, Catholicism, or Communism. But we are not afraid of these influences, and believe that each person is, or ought to be, capable of fending for himself.
 * pp. 65-66.

 * If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; If you talk to the dead, you are a schizophrenic.
 * "Schizophrenia", p. 101.

 * Psychiatrists look for twisted molecules and defective genes as the causes of schizophrenia, because schizophrenia is the name of a disease. If Christianity or Communism were called diseases, would they then look for the chemical and genetic “causes” of these “conditions”?
 * p. 102.

 * Although both the natural and moral sciences seek to understand the objects of their observation, in natural science the purpose of this is to be able to control them better, whereas in moral science it is, or ought to be, to be better able to leave them alone. The morally proper aim of psychology, then, is self-control.
 * "Science and Scientism", p. 115.

 * Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine; now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic.
 * "Science and Scientism", p. 115.

 * Psychiatry is institutionalized scientism: it is the systematic imitation, impersonation, counterfeiting, and deception. This is the formula: every adult smokes (drinks, engages in sexual activity, etc.); hence, to prove that he is an adult, the adolescent smokes (drinks, engages in sexual activity, etc). Mutatis mutandis: every science consists of classification, control, and prediction; hence to prove psychiatry is a science, the psychiatrist classifies, controls, predicts. The result is that he classifies people as mad; that he confines them as dangerous (to themselves or others); and that he predicts people's behavior, robbing them of their free will and hence of their very humanity.
 * "Science and Scientism", p. 115.

 * For Jews, the Messiah has never come; for Christians, He has come but once; for modern man, He appears and disappears with increasing rapidity. The saviors of modern man, the "scientists" who promise salvation through the "discoveries" of ethology and sociology, psychology and psychiatry, and all the other bogus religions, issue forth periodically, as if selected by some Messiah-of-the-Month Club.
 * "Science and Scientism", p. 116.

 * A child becomes an adult when he realizes that he has a right not only to be right but also to be wrong.
 * Childhood

The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (1961)

 * I became interested in writing this book approximately ten years ago when, having become established as a psychiatrist, I became increasingly impressed by the vague, capricious and generally unsatisfactory character of the widely used concept of mental illness and its corollaries, diagnosis, prognosis and treatment. Although (mental illness) might have been a useful concept in the nineteenth century, today it is scientifically worthless and socially harmful. In non-psychiatric circles mental illness all too often is considered to be whatever psychiatrists say it is. The answer to the question, Who is mentally ill? thus becomes: Those who are confined in mental hospitals or who consult psychiatrists in their private offices.
 * Preface to the First Edition.

 * It becomes logical to ask where the idea originates that the rules of the game of life ought to be such that those who are weak, disabled or ill should be helped? One answer is obvious: this is the game typically played in childhood. Every one of us was, at one time, a weak and helpless child, cared for by adults: without such help we would not have survived and become adults. Another, almost equally obvious answer is that the prescription of a help-giving attitude toward the weak is embodied in the dominant religions of Western man. Judaism, and especially Christianity, teach these rules by means of parable and prohibition, example and exhortation, and by every other means available to their representatives.
 * Chapter 10: The Ethics of Helplessness and Helpfulness.

 * It is customary to define psychiatry as a medical specialty concerned with the study, diagnosis and treatment of mental illnesses. This is a worthless and misleading definition. Mental illness is a myth. Psychiatrists are not concerned with mental illnesses and their treatments. In actual practice they deal with personal, social and ethical problems in living. I have argued that, today, the notion of a person "having a mental illness" is scientifically crippling. It provides professional assent to a popular rationalization — namely that problems in living experienced and expressed in terms of so-called psychiatric symptoms are basically similar to bodily diseases. Moreover, the concept of mental illness also undermines the principle of personal responsibility, the ground on which all free political institutions rest.
 * Conclusions.

 * I started to work on this book in 1954, when, having been called to active duty in the Navy, I was relieved of the burdens of a full-time psychoanalytic practice... Within a year of its publication, the Commissioner of the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene demanded, in a letter citing specifically 'The Myth Of Mental Illness', that I be dismissed from my university position because I did not "believe" in mental illness.
 * Preface to the Second Edition.

Ceremonial Chemistry (1974)

 * If, nevertheless, textbooks of pharmacology legitimately contain a chapter on drug abuse and drug addiction, then, by the same token, textbooks of gynecology and urology should contain a chapter on prostitution; textbooks of physiology, a chapter on perversion; textbooks of genetics, a chapter on the racial inferiority of Jews and Negroes.
 * p. 11.

 * Why is self-control, autonomy, such a threat to authority? Because the person who controls himself, who is his own master, has no need for an authority to be his master. This, then, renders authority unemployed. What is he to do if he cannot control others? To be sure, he could mind his own business. But this is a fatuous answer, for those who are satisfied to mind their own business do not aspire to become authorities.
 * Revised edition, 1985. p. 175.

Schizophrenia: The Sacred Symbol of Psychiatry (1979)

 * The gist of my argument is that men like Kraepelin, Bleuler and Freud were not what they claimed or seem to be—namely, physicians or medical investigators; they were, in fact, religious-political leaders and conquerors. Instead of discovering new diseases, they extended, through psychiatry, the imagery, vocabulary, jurisdiction, and hence the territory of medicine to what they were not, and are not, diseases in the original Virchowian sense.

The Untamed Tongue: A Dissenting Dictionary (1990)

 * Parents teach children discipline for two different, indeed diametrically opposed, reasons: to render the child submissive to them and to make him independent of them. Only a self-disciplined person can be obedient; and only such a person can be autonomous.

 * The concept of disease is fast replacing the concept of responsibility. With increasing zeal Americans use and interpret the assertion "I am sick" as equivalent to the assertion "I am not responsible": Smokers say they are not responsible for smoking, drinkers that they are not responsible for drinking, gamblers that they are not responsible for gambling, and mothers who murder their infants that they are not responsible for killing. To prove their point — and to capitalize on their self-destructive and destructive behavior — smokers, drinkers, gamblers, and insanity acquitees are suing tobacco companies, liquor companies, gambling casinos, and physicians. Can American society survive this legal-psychiatric assault on its moral and political foundations?

 * People, especially liberals and psychiatrists, say that the two main causes of crime are mental illness and poverty. Insanity is therefore a defense in the criminal law. If we really believed that poverty caused crime, we would have a "poverty defense" as well, attorneys calling professors of economics to testify in court whether a particular defendant is guilty of theft or not by reason of poverty.

 * The Greeks distinguished between good and bad behavior, language that enhanced or diminished persons. Being intoxicated with scientism, we fail to recognize that the seemingly technical terms used to identify psychiatric illnesses and interventions are simply dyphemisms and euphemisms.

 * In the natural sciences, language (mathematics) is a useful tool: like the microscope or telescope, it enables us to see what is otherwise invisible. In the social sciences, language (literalized metaphor) is an impediment: like a distorting mirror, it prevents us from seeing the obvious. That is why in the natural sciences, knowledge can be gained only with the mastery of their special languages; whereas in human affairs, knowledge can be gained only by rejecting the pretentious jargons of the social sciences.

Anti-Freud (1990)

 * The great shift … is the movement away from the value-laden languages of … the “humanities,” and toward the ostensibly value-neutral languages of the “sciences.” This attempt to escape from, or to deny, valuation is … especially important in psychology … and the so-called social sciences. Indeed, one could go so far as to say that the specialized languages of these disciplines serve virtually no other purpose than to conceal valuation behind an ostensibly scientific and therefore nonvaluational semantic screen.
 * p. 44.

 * The language of science—and especially of a science of man—is, necessarily, anti-individualistic, and hence a threat to human freedom and dignity.
 * p. 44.

 * As the base rhetorician uses language to increase his own power, to produce converts to his own cause, and to create loyal followers of his own person—so the noble rhetorician uses language to wean men away from their inclination to depend on authority, to encourage them to think and speak clearly, and to teach them to be their own masters.
 * p. 55.

 * Since it seems to be the nature of man that he wants to go to hell as quickly as possible, it is not surprising that effective base rhetoricians can greatly accelerate this process for millions. … Many individuals try to drive men into slavery, as if they were cattle, but only a few succeed. These we hail as “great historical figures.” I submit that we cannot judge the noble rhetorician by this standard. Since he urges men to be better than they are, the noble rhetorician cannot possibly succeed in changing those who prefer to remain as they are or become evil. Indeed, because his task is to bring men to themselves, not to him, the noble rhetorician ought not to be judged by his manifest effect on others at all. Rather, he ought to be judged by the clarity and steadfastness with which he proclaims his counsel. Should not a single person heed his advice, the noble rhetorician would still have to be judged successful in proportion as he succeeds in perfecting his own language. … In the final analysis, what Karl Kraus sought was to purify himself by purifying his own language. He achieved his goal. He dies a semantic saint in a semantically satanic society.
 * pp. 56-57.

 * Like Karl Kraus, [Wittgenstein] was seldom pleased by what he saw of the institutions of men, and the idiom of the passerby mostly offended his ear—particularly when they happened to speak philosophically; and like Karl Kraus, he suspected that the institutions could not but be corrupt if the idiom of the race was confused, presumptuous, and vacuous, a fabric of nonsense, untruth, deception, and self-deception.
 * p. 67.

Our Right to Drugs (1992)

 * As Justice Olive Wendell Holmes, Jr. put it, censorship rests on the idea that “every idea is an incitement.” Perhaps he should have specified “every interesting idea,” for a dull idea is not. By the same token, every interesting drug is an incitement. And so is everything else that people find interesting.
 * p. 35.

The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997)

 * Over the past thirty years, we have replaced the medical-political persecution of illegal sex users ("perverts" and "psychopaths") with the even more ferocious medical-political persecution of illegal drug users.
 * p. xi.

 * As the dominant social ethic changed from a religious to a secular one, the problem of heresy disappeared, and the problem of madness arose and became of great social significance. In the next chapter I shall examine the creation of social deviants, and shall show that as formerly priests had manufactured heretics, so physicians, as the new guardians of social conduct and morality, began to manufacture madmen.
 * p. 160.

 * We shall therefore compare the concept of homosexuality as heresy, prevalent in the days of the witch-hunts, with the concept of homosexuality as mental illness, prevalent today.
 * p. 161.

 * The Christian ethic did not raise the worth of female life much above the Jewish: nor did the clinical ethic raise it much above the clerical. This is why most of those identified as witches by male inquisitors were women; and why most of those diagnosed as hysterics by male psychiatrists were also women.
 * p. 162.

 * The episode in Sodom is undoubtedly the earliest account in human history of the entrapment of homosexuals, a strategy widely practiced by the law enforcement agencies of modern Western countries, especially those of the United States. In effect, the men of Sodom were entrapped by two strangers, who in truth were not travelers but angels, that is to say, God’s plain-clothesmen. These agents of the Biblical vice-squad wasted no time punishing the offenders.
 * p. 162.

 * The crime [homosexuality] was subject to punishment by both secular and ecclesiastical courts—just as now it is subject to punishment by both penal and psychiatric sanctions.
 * p. 164.

 * In English-speaking countries, the connection between heresy and homosexuality is expressed through the use of a single word to denote both concepts: buggery. … Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (Third Edition) defines “buggery” as “heresy, sodomy.”
 * p. 165.

 * This connection, at once semantic and conceptual, between unorthodoxy and sodomy, was firmly established during the late Middle Ages, and has never been severed. It is as strong today as it was six hundred years ago. To be stigmatized as a heretic or bugger in the fourteenth century was to cast out of society. Since the dominant ideology was theological, religious deviance was considered so grave an offense as to render the individual a nonperson. Whatever redeeming qualities he might have had counted for naught. The sin of heresy eclipsed all contradictory, personal characteristics, just as the teachings of God and the Church eclipsed all contradictory empirical observations. The disease called “mental illness”—and its subspecies “homosexuality”—plays the same role today.
 * p. 166.

 * By pretending that convention is Nature, that disobeying a personal prohibition is a medical illness, they establish themselves as agents of social control and at the same time disguise their punitive interventions in the semantic and social trappings of medical practice.
 * p. 167.

 * The disease concept of homosexuality—as with the disease concept of all so-called mental illnesses, such as alcoholism, drug addiction, or suicide—conceals the fact that homosexuals are a group of medically stigmatized and socially persecuted individuals. … Their anguished cries of protest are drowned out by the rhetoric of therapy—just as the rhetoric of salvation drowned out the [cries] of heretics.
 * p. 168.

 * The homosexual is a scapegoat who evokes no sympathy. Hence, he can only be a victim, never a martyr.
 * p. 169.

 * So long as men denounce each other as mentally sick (homosexual, addicted, insane, and so forth)—so that the madman can always be considered the Other, never the Self—mental illness will remain an easily exploitable concept, and Coercive Psychiatry a flourishing institution.
 * p. 170.

 * My contention is that the psychiatric perspective on homosexuality is but a thinly disguised replica of the religious perspective which it displaced, and that efforts to “treat” this kind of conduct medically are but thinly disguised methods for suppressing it.
 * pp. 170-171.

 * The “treatment” can have only one goal: to convert the heretic to the true faith, to transform the homosexual into a heterosexual.
 * p. 172.

 * Like the devout theologian seeing the Devil lurking everywhere, Menninger, the devout Freudian, sees aggression.
 * p. 172.

 * The passion to interpret as madness that with which we disagree seems to have infected the best of contemporary minds.
 * p. 203.

 * There is a fundamental similarity between the persecution of individuals who engage in consenting homosexual activity in private, or who ingest, inject, or smoke various substances that alter their feelings and thoughts—and the traditional persecution of men for their religion. … What all of these persecutions have in common is that the victims are harassed by the majority not because they engage in overtly aggressive or destructive acts, … but because their conduct or appearance offends a group intolerant to and threatened by human differences.
 * pp. 208-209.

title: Thomas Szasz


text:
Dwight Macdonald

Dwight Macdonald (March 24, 1906 – December 19, 1982) was a U.S. writer, editor, film critic, social critic, philosopher, and political radical.

Quotes

 * Can one imagine that The Bomb could ever be used "in a good cause"? Do not such means instantly, of themselves, corrupt any cause? The bomb is the natural product of the kind of society we have created. It is as easy, normal, and unforced an expression of the American way of Life as electric ice-boxes,banana splits, and hydro-matic drive automobiles.
 * "Politics" magazine, (August, 1945).
 * Conversation means being able to disagree and still continue the discussion.

 * The Anarchists' uncompromising rejection of the State, the subject of Marxian sneers for its "absolutist" and "Utopian" character, makes much better sense in the present era than the Marxist relativist and historical approach. The pacifists also seem to be more realistic than the Marxist both in their understanding of modern war and also in their attempts to do something about it...
 * "The Root is Man" (1946).

 * By 'socialism' I mean a classless society in which the State has disappeared, production is cooperative, and no man has political or economic power over another. The touchstone would be the extent to which each individual could develop his own talents and personality.
 * "The Root is Man" (1946).

 * Pacifism, to me, is primarily a way of actively struggling against injustice and inhumanity... My kind of pacifism may be called "non-violent resistance."
 * Speech, 1947. Quoted in Scott H. Bennett, Radical Pacifism: The War Resisters League and Gandhian Nonviolence in America, 1915-1963, Syracuse University Press, 2003.

 * It was an earnest, extreme, and irreverent book, a book that, in its mockery of authority, its relentless logic, its relentless hewing to the line of Reason, letting the sacred cows fall where they might, followed the old familiar script: CAMPUS REBEL FLAYS FACULTY. But the script was all balled up, for the author was more reactionary than any of the dignitaries in their black robes, and his book damned Yale as a hotbed of atheism and collectivism.
 * Review of God and Man at Yale by William F. Buckley, Jr., quoted in Grace Elizabeth Hale, A Nation of Outsiders:How the White Middle Class Fell in Love With Rebellion in Postwar America. Oxford University Press, 2011.

Quotes about Macdonald

 * ...MacDonald, in a veritable furor of intellectual integrity and moral honesty sets out to hunt down his "mistakes" without ever changing the record in the slightest, his technique being to annotate his earlier articles with refutations of himself.
 * Hannah Arendt, "He's All Dwight", The New York Review of Books, August 1, 1968.

title: Dwight Macdonald


text:
Murray Kempton

James Murray Kempton (December 16, 1917 – May 5, 1997) was an American journalist and social and political commentator who received the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary.

Quotes

 * One does not attend this movie; one enlists in it.
 * "Serpents on the Nile," a review of The Ten Commandments (1956)

 * The faces in New York remind me of people who had played a game and lost.

 * Great care has gone into the construction of the shadow which declares itself to be Richard Nixon.

 * If you talk to gangsters long enough, you’ll find out they’re just as bad as respectable people.

 * In baseball, the true class enemy is not the boss, but the fan.

 * Donald Trump dresses his hatred up as though it were a peacock's feathers. In any polity entitled to think itself civilized, persons with regard for their breeding would leave the room politely but definitely whenever Donald Trump entered it.

 * For touching a people who want to forget ugly problems, no politician equals the one who has already forgotten them himself.
 * On Ronald Reagan’s presidency

title: Murray Kempton


text:
Talk:The Art of War

All the Art of War quotes are under Sun Tzu

title: Talk:The Art of War